EDITOR, The Tribune. 

Today’s press release by former prime minister Dr Hubert Minnis is an effort to buy time and drum up public support and sympathy. It sets the stage for a political waiting game, if you will. Dr Minnis simply does not know what to do. He would like to draw the FNM’s leadership into a public debate regarding its decision not to renominate him. Such a debate is a foolish proposition that would only distract the public from the PLP’s failed record and strengthen the PLP’s efforts to be re-elected. The PLP wants such a public fight and the FNM should not aid and abet them.

Dr Minnis’s objective is to try to remain relevant by creating a public back and forth to distract and confuse the party and the electorate. The FNM and the Bahamian people have much bigger fish to fry. There should be a “no comment” policy in response to any questions posed to the FNM regarding Dr Minnis’s political listening tour cum waiting game. It is useless to add fire to a wet firecracker. Let’s not be mistaken, Dr Minnis’s threatened independent run will be less of a threat to the FNM than the COI’s third party campaign. A party fielding a full slate of candidates is more dangerous than a disgruntled politician who decides to go it alone. However, Dr Minnis is in a bind in this regard also because joining the COI means subjecting himself, a former prime minister, to the leadership of Lincoln Bain, a man whose FNM nomination for the Pinewood constituency he personally rejected back in 2016. The appropriate response to any attempt to distract and confuse the FNM and the electorate by those who wish to see the FNM fail is to heed the oft-repeated advice of party leader Michael Pintard: stay focused.

For Dr Minnis, it is either run as an independent or do not run at all. That is both his personal choice and his right in a functioning democracy. I anticipate that the leadership of the FNM will give him the space to decide what he deems is best for his own political ambitions. It isn’t easy for someone who once held unprecedented and unrestrained political power, as the self-titled Competent Authority possessed, to have to now grapple with feeling so politically powerless. Dr Minnis’s press release allows him to retain a modicum of control over the end of his political career. Ultimately, it is for him to decide whether he wishes to exit the political stage 1) with grace, by enumerating in parliament his perceived successes as prime minister before formally bowing out of elective politics, something former prime minister Hubert Ingraham was denied when he retired from parliament in 2012; or 2) in disgrace in the event he suffers an embarrassing electoral defeat in Killarney at the next general elections.

Dr Minnis is a very rich man. Regardless of whether the economy goes up or down he will be just fine. While the uncertainty surrounding whether he will or won’t run may make for interesting political theatre in the minds of some, there are precious few whose pockets will be changed one way or the other by his decision. In the meantime, then, the FNM must tend to the important work at hand, which is of course focusing on the needs of the Bahamian people, and not be distracted by the actions or political theatrics of Dr Hubert Minnis.

S André Rollins

Killarney, New Providence

April 13, 2025.