Minnis is not saying that Hubert Ingraham and Perry Christie were the slicksters that orchestrated this oil deal for their own benefit.

We have sacrificed the health of the nation for the wealth of the nation!

This too WILL fail.

We are already the 6th most expensive country in the world to live in, how the hell can we afford more taxation?

We are also not seizing the Covid Chance to 'Reinvent our tourism front line. Now is the time to deal with disgusting jet ski operators and others that drag our tourism product into the gutter!

No way should we go back to business as usual.

attorney General Carl Bethel SHOULD be in dialog with other states on the European blacklist to form their own block in competition to the EU group of thugs!

Better yet, throw Perswell overboard in deep blue water and anchor Monique Pindling to him!

Regardless of the inequity, the cruise industry inflicts on us, the government seems so overly hard-pressed to kick-start the tourism sector that the cruise companies will have them right back to licking their boots and begging for crumbs in short order!

Alternatively, the Bahamas should be controlling our stop-over visitor numbers by setting a maximum amount of cruise tourists allowed in the country at any one time. This would encourage visitors to swap to stay-over vacations.

We cannot allow short term desperation to return us to kissing cruise ship smokestacks for pennies, while they rape the industry.

Another Nassau Village on the way!

I warned the government right here that removing the need for testing upon arrival was a sure recipe for disaster. It seems the government is acting out of panic for US dollars over common sense.

This scenario will play out multiple times in the tourism sector until the country is forced to close just before Xmas and New Years busy seasons.

Secondly, the so called furious Lyford Cay residents omitted that the big party was attended by their neighbors!

Unfortunately, the reality is successive governments were brain dead mammoths with no hands-on experience in tourism, which explains why the sector regressed over the last 50 years.

The undeniable lesson that they should have learned from the cruise industry disaster, is we should be hastily shifting more focus to stay-over visitors, which is more sustainable and contributes 70% more to the local economy per capita, and is far more environmentally friendly than the greedy cruise ship industry that thinks it is their GOD given right to hog-up the majority of the tourism pie regardless of the fact that without the Bahamas and Caribbean destinations their cruise ships would totally useless.

Given our proximity to North and Latin America, what the government should be doing is devising ways to encourage these people to stay-over in the Bahamas. One obvious way of targeting a new wider stay-over market would be to reposition the Bahamas as a duty-free shopping destination. Why successive governments are blind to this is beyond comprehension.

Hotels and every business remotely connected to tourism would see massive growth in such volumes that any government revenue lost in duty-free sales would be tremendously offset by taxes collected from the rest of the tourism industry. Another bonus to the local economy would be Bahamians would shop at home rather than the U.S.

The cruise industry has it's positives as well, however, because of the massive volume they move, they are too greedy and too controlling, to rely on partnering in business with.

We must change direction or we will remain at the mercy of the cruise industry waiting for them to drop a few crumbs for our survival.