By PAVEL BAILEY

THE Free National Movement hosted a conclave on Saturday to discuss their plans for the future and criticising the Davis Administration’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, crime and government’s mixed messages on taxes.

At a press conference held at FNM headquarters senior party members, including Opposition leader Micheal Pintard, came together to discuss their parties‘ plans to bounce back from the last election.

Following the conclave, the party intends to run a grassroots campaign across the nation to reconnect with their base who they believe felt abandoned during the previous Minnis administration.

It was also during this conclave that several prominent FNM party members took aim at the current administration with what they described as the PLP’s mishandling of the nation.

Among them was FNM chairman Dr Duane Sands, former Minister of Health.

He acknowledged the recent spike in virus cases and stated that he is not surprised by this recent development.

“There is certainly no surprise, the metrics of COVID in The Bahamas have been demonstrating an uptick, an increase now for several weeks. We have seen an increase in the number of cases, an increase in the hospitalisation rates. We’ve had two additional deaths, we’re now at 800 (deaths),” Dr Sands said.

Dr Sands attributed the recent COVID spike to growing public disillusionment with safety protocols.

While not calling for a restoration of stricter health guidelines, Dr Sands said that stronger adherence to existing measures could help bring the numbers back down.

“The challenge unfortunately is that the message of discipline is no longer popular, and as much as we would all like to move beyond COVID, unfortunately around the world in the United States, at our backdoor COVID is very much here.

“The Bahamas has not been as aggressive with its vaccination uptake as we perhaps would like. And certainly, all of these things put together unfortunately places us in a somewhat challenging position with COVID. By the grace of God and with a little bit more adherence to the COVID protocols we might see this tampered down over time but right now we are in a difficult spot.”

Mr Pintard, when questioned on the PLP’s recent crime conclave he criticised the move.

He said it was not an effective collaboration to face high crime rates head on, adding the meeting only gave a police briefing on the surge of gang violence and homicides in the nation with no real action to address the issue being taken since then.

“In terms of it being a real collaborative meeting where we could have discussed a range of possible solutions, whether it’s direct crime fighting that the police oversees, whether it is issues with respect to the judiciary, whether it’s social and other interventions by the ministry of social services, etc, those discussions were not had in any meaningful way.” He went on to describe the conclave as a “public relations exercise.”

The leader of the opposition went on to urge the government to clarify its tax position.

He said: “We hope that the government would explain its plans to meet the revenue projections that they have stated, I think it’s somewhere around 1.3 billion. They claim that they don’t intend to introduce new taxes the prime minister has made that statement. But his ministers have clearly signaled that they intend to raise taxes.

“So, they have to get on the same page in terms of what is the message of this government in terms of how they are going to reach the revenue targets that they have and essentially without raising taxes. That’s one thing, the second is that they forecasted that they are going to cut the staff in multiple ministries and the allocation to multiple ministries. Again, the messaging is confusing, because the prime minister has said one thing on the subject, his other ministers have said something else.”