By ALICIA WALLACE

The next general election is just down the road and around the corner. The current administration is making promises and already signalling the need for more time to “continue” its work and the opposition is pointing fingers and asking questions. Political parties are starting to reveal their candidate slates as rumours about who will stay, who will go, and who will be newly nominated fly around.

Power struggles within political parties are coming to the fore. The media is in a state of perpetual readiness for stories of all kinds and sizes as it relates to internal political party issues, lambasting of one party by another, candidate announcements, and the possibility of an early election.

Partisan politics in The Bahamas is, by design, an absurd theatre that piques curiosity even in its monotony and predictability. Politicians are current and prospective employees of the Bahamian people. When they seek employment, they sing and dance, sing and dance, sing and dance.

Empty promises flow from their mouths with boring, repetitious, uninspiring rhetoric until they resort to name calling and lobbing accusations at others, punctuated by catchphrases and snippets of music that do nothing more than make people laugh. The employers are seated in the audience, eyes glued to the stage, watching the performance. Casting was done without their input. The stage was already set. All they can do is spend money at the concession stand and mindlessly eat and drink as they watch the show someone else selected.

Some audience members wonder what is going on backstage. Who wrote the script? Who is directing the cast? Why were these people even cast in these roles? Some notice the dark corners of the stage and try ‘to see what is happening where the lights are dim and the view of some performers is obscured. There is little room, it seems, for participation. Employers watch the show, waiting for the breaks between acts to discuss, make predictions, and argue with one another about the meaning of it all. Only when the show is over do most of the employers take their positions, ready to decide who will win it all with a single review—the vote. 

When they are hired, the employees lose interest in pleasing their employers, even at the most basic level which, in our case, is putting on a show of dedication to the work that the employers—the people—want done. They take to the stage when it suits them, regardless of the presence of a waiting audience. The frequently show up unprepared, some never having attended a single rehearsal. It sometimes becomes clear that the employees fail to work together backstage before attempting another one-way engagement with audience. They sloppily deliver unplanned monologues and are thwarted by simple improv activities. They show that the backstage coordination is often nonexistent. They reveal their arrogance in their insistence on being a part of the performance, regardless of their levels of preparation. The stage, they believe, is theirs.

Once the prospective employees secure their positions, their already inadequate engagement with employers exponentially worsens. The performance required to get the job has depleted them, not only of energy, but the ability to pretend to care about the experience of the audience. If they sit in the theatre, in complete darkness, so be it. It is their own fault for expecting a show. The season is over. They should be grateful for the amateur hours that, from time to time, make use of the theatre space.

Politics can certainly take another form. There is the potential for the people, the employers, to reclaim power. It is entirely possible for the current and prospective employees to be held to a higher standard.

The existing system is dysfunctional. The existing practices disadvantage the people. Politicians see themselves as performers in a play, and they have no motivation to change the way they play their parts, much less commit themselves to affecting the reality that sits just beneath the fiction they use as cover. We, the people, know, to varying degrees, that what they see as a bit of fun amongst themselves is actually our lives. Allowing them to write the script and cast themselves and people like them is acceptance of ill fate.

The people vying for our votes are not leaders, and they are not trying to be leaders. They are satisfied to pretend. The fact is that we need representatives. One of our greatest struggles is that the people who get our votes—almost exclusively because we reject the people or the associated party running against them—do not know, care about, or ask us about the issues we face daily and need to have addressed. They do not live in our neighbourhoods. They seem to drive on different roads, present at different healthcare facilities, and send their children to receive a different quality of education than that which is available to us. We have to admit the self-governance and majority rule are not what we have when the people in parliament are not, in fact, like us. Worse, they prove, repeatedly, that they have no interest in even knowing what it is like to be us. If they did, they would engage us in the processes that have already begun ahead of the next general election. They are still more than comfortable with making a series of decisions with no input from the people directly affected by them, then turning to us with a singular question: This set of actors, or the other?

We need electoral reform. We need to know how political parties are funded. We need to be involved in the selection of candidates. We need to know when the election will be held, every single time, through a fixed date. We need to be assured that we will not have to endure the incompetence of any Member of Parliament for five years, equipped with a recall system. We need to be able to choose the best candidate in our constituencies without endorsing the leader of their political party to the prime minister. We need the boundaries to be set, not to be tampered with every five years. We need political quotas to reach gender equality in frontline politics. We need a modern system for voter registration and the tallying of votes. We need a national development plan that drives the agenda for every term and beyond.

We need a government that is led by the people. We need politicians who are the people, in every sense, and commit themselves to the highest good of the people, centring those in situations of vulnerability. We need to them to have integrity and be led it, and we need them to be discontented with the systems that do not serve us, such that they work together, with us, to build what we need rather than use the opportunity for personal gain.

At Women’s Wednesdays this evening, Equality Bahamas is facilitating a workshop designed to identify issues and develop recommendations to address them. There will be working groups on two thematic areas—social services and the environment. Members of the public are welcome to participate in one of the working groups at 6pm at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas on West Hill Street. Register at tiny.cc/fbc2025.

RECOMMENDATIONS

1. Read The Women Could Fly by Megan Giddings with Feminist Book Club, hosted by Equality Bahamas and Poinciana Paper Press. The publisher described the book as “a biting social commentary from the acclaimed author of Lakewood that speaks to our times—a piercing dystopian novel about the unbreakable bond between a young woman and her mysterious mother, set in a world in which witches are real and single women are closely monitored.” The Women Could Fly is available in print, ebook, and audio formats. Get your copy, read it, and join the conversation at Poinciana Paper Press (12 Parkgate Road) on Wednesday July 16 at 6pm. Register at tiny.cc/fbc2025 to receive Feminist Book Club updates.

2. Take a summer class at Poinciana Paper Press. There are great workshops being offered on Saturdays in July and August. On Saturday, July 12, there is a full day introduction to paper making running from 10am to 4pm. All material is provided for participants. On July 19, from 10am to 4pm, there is a pulp painting workshop. This is an interesting art form that is sure to intrigue, challenge, and delight participants. Choosing a design or subject, getting it on paper, dying the pulp to get the correct colors, then painting with the dyed pulp is quite the process and it has to be experienced to truly be understood. A pulp painting is currently on display in the upstairs ballroom at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas as a part of the tenth National Exhibition. Sonia Farmer’s pulp paining is a depiction of coral that was taken from Bahamian waters in 1923 and put on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and she is sharing her knowledge through the workshop on July 19. For information on these and other summer workshops, visit the registration page at lu.ma/pppsummerclasses25.