Tempest in a teapot that means nothing to the well-being of the Bahamas.

Interesting to see the comments of those who denigrate Rollins because he quit and slammed the door on his way out. Words like "traitor" are awfully strong, because it implies that Rollins should have swallowed his pride, brought his manhood on a plate to Mad Brad, and toed the party line. He couldn't abide the party and voted with his feet. There is nothing traitorous about that and sometimes the patriotic thing to do, is to do your utmost to bring down a contemptible, slimy, corruption-ridden kleptocracy of those bottom-feeders and sub-humans who don't deserve the right to be called "Honourable".

Interesting that Singapore is not on the list, and from my perspective on the ground, Singapore is eating our lunch. I can't count how many clients from the book of business have ended up in Singapore after giving us the heave-ho. The most-often cited exit reason is the backwardness of our financial infrastructure.

There is a more active and proactive stance for wealth management, than burying it on a Caribbean beach. Clients want to be able to move money, securities, investments, portfolios, currency accounts and assets into and out of trusts at the speed of light, and we can't comply.

The old model of wealth management was to let the portfolio sit here, review the investment performance yearly, and make changes on a yearly basis. Now, clients want these services within 24 hours.

You are not a cynic. What you say is true. They just want Izmirlian out of the picture, and will hold the country hostage to do it.

As an aside to show the perfidy of the Chinese, everytime our IT department deploys a new computer server, within minutes, the logs show that someone from the Chinese Environment Ministry or some other department hiding state-sanctioned hackers, is trying to hack into it. This is within hours of deployment.

I would like to point out the dissonance between what Johnq is saying & what I am saying. My leitmotif was about governance. It wasn't about fighting for independence, or African or Pan African ideals. It was about stable governance in a post-colonial setting.

Johnq references Lumumba, Cabral, Sankara et al, who were freedom fighters for majority rule. None were in power as governing figures of a state for more than a year. They were assassinated by the CIA, colonial powers, internecine warfare & a whole host of agents, external & internal who ultimately were responsible for their violent demise. They were effective leaders, but there is no measure of their governance, because they were not long in state power. The point that Ayittey makes, is that once a peaceful statehood struggle is over, good governance of Black-led & Black-peopled post-colonial countries is abysmal in general.

As a Black Bahamian, I am too young to know what the heady days of independence were like or what the pre-conditions were like. I do know that my great uncle from Grants Town fondly remembers the UBP days when nobody was hungry, the country was safe &secure from all alarms, he was a regular at the Cat & Fiddle, and life was not the grind that it is for him today. The Bahamian cultural scene was alive with government-promoted stars like Ronnie Butler and King Eric Gibson, and he fondly recalls years satisfied well-being that he misses. His neighbourhood has fallen to shreds around him & the punks in his neighbourhood scare him.

I am not too naive to understand that there was no equality Blacks and White -but today in 2015 there is no equality for women in the constitution at present.

The bottom line is that we have not had good governance. Occam's Razor tells me that we are not a success as a democratic state. Our government is rife with corruption and our founding government was criminal.

If the endemic low nationalistic self-esteem from a Black population prevents us from rationally acknowledging that our own leaders led us down the garden path to a failed state then there is no hope for this beautiful archipelago. The first step to solving a problem, is admitting that there is one. PLP partisans who cannot handle the truth of our history are rife in these lands & that is a major impediment towards development & advancement.

We have not done a very good job of self governance, and until we admit that fact, raise our consciousness, enlightenment and development to the point where we say "We are not going to take it anymore", then the future is indeed dark for The Bahamas. And throwing out the mace was a disrespect to the democratic tradition that it represented. It represented the authority of House, and he himself gained that self-same authority represented by the mace through the democratic tradition that he violated.

Thanks again for your point of view. I hope that you can see a little bit of mine. “Forward Upward Onward Together”.

The Ghanaian economist, George Ayittey, in a TED Talk, said "There have been over 500 Black leaders of nations. Name ten famous, good ones." Nobody can. Nelson Mandela comes to mind first & foremost. And yet one can easily name many bad ones: Idi Amin, Mobutu, Mugabe, Al Bashir, Charles Taylor, etc. He frequently addresses why more often than not, Black people have trouble ruling themselves post-colonially.

It is because of tribalism & cronyism that post-colonial countries lose control of the civil service, security forces, judiciary, election centers & national bank to these despotic criminal leaders. That is exactly what happening in the Pindling era & that is what we see today with the PLP Attorney General squashing oversight into public funds; extra-judicial killings by police officers; he raping of the treasury with BAMSI & Urban Renewal.

There is just one exception to post-colonial failure in a Black country & that is Botswana. It succeeded primarily because of state legitimacy & a strong democratic tradition. Publicly elected leaders acted patriotically, protected the state and her possessions on behalf of the people and worked for the common good instead of self-interest. Other reasons given are a spectrum of good governance, inter-ethnic harmony & unity, respect for democracy, & strong commercial traditions.

Essentially we were screwed from the beginning with Pindling. He demonstrated his lack of respect for democracy by throwing the Parliamentary Mace out of the window & once in power, ran a racketeering ring to enrich himself & his cronies. These are the foundations of our country.

As for commercial traditions, we did have a convertible currency & a currency board (before the Central Bank) where one could use Bahamian dollars outside the country at a given exchange rate. Because the PLP government got hooked on running the country on debt, the currency board was abolished the Bahamian dollar was pegged, and non-convertible, ruining the global aspirations of Bahamian business. You can't participate in trade if your money is no good anywhere but at home.

So essentially we are truly incapable of governing ourselves. When Prime Minister Ingraham put forward a referendum for the constitutional equality of women, and put forward plans for eCommerce as the Third Pillar of the Economy, the criminal PLP campaigned vigorously against him, and even having odious scum like Valentine Grimes delivering fake ballots to polling stations. There are still pictures on the internet of lineups on Grand Bahama of Obie Wilchcombe buying votes publicly and the police guarding the moneybox.

As a result, the country is a mean old junkyard of rapacious, crowded rats in a cage, lying to each other and eking out a living the best they can. Human dignity is lost. The truth is rotting with the dead potcakes in the bushes, and the noble Bahamian people have been stamped out, replaced by nasty hypocrites. There is no hope.

Minnis may not have 'curb-appeal', charisma, nor is he savvy when it comes to politics, but I do think that he has the administrative skills, the economic knowledge and the practical sense to run the country. Unfortunately that counts for naught in this banana republic.

Gomez just outlined his criminal associations with his statements. Enough said. As a homophobic, partisan archbishop's son and the lawyer of the biggest drug smuggler of the 1980's -- he has all of the hallmarks of killing any semblance of the literal truth, none of it which resides in any of his words.

It is disingenuous to say that HAI had anything to do with the Izmirlians hooking up with the Chinese. The original Heads of Agreement was with Harrahs, and Harrahs were unable to come up with the financing. They backed out. As a result, it looked like Baha Mar was dead.

There was no love between the Izmirlians and HAI. As a matter of fact, Baha Mar wanted relief from the outstanding casino tax -- some ten+ millions of dollars unpaid by the Izmirlians, and HAI stood his ground.

The Chinese had been sniffing around the Caribbean for a long time, looking to offset America's influence and that is why they stepped in. At the time the Heads of Agreement included Scotiabank as equity partners as they held a mortgage on the Baha Mar.

But it is simplistic, stupid and not correct to cast aspersions on the Chinese and blame the Baha Mar mess on the Chinese.

Incidentally, many pundits including myself and some economics were predicting a Baha Mar failure when the idea was first floated. It is just plain not economically feasible when they do not have the experience differentiators like Atlantis does with the dolphins, the water park, the aquarium, Marina Village etc. Baha Mar is still peddling a tired tourism product on a dated part of town without the cachet of Paradise Island.

You are so right about the Chinese culture losing face. It is the first rule in dealing with the Chinese.

>Are the children savages that can't be helped?

yes

>politicians who take the average citizen for some type of idiot

with good cause

>teachers who couldn't care less about whether students learn or not

exactly the situation

You and I can write intelligently, and do sums, and have a decent cursive script, and can transmit information in a erudite fashion. Look at this sentence posted on Facebook: "Yall cost them loose they job naaa lol petty". The person was responding to a photo of a Bahamian student attending prom in an ambulance, and her date kisses her and she wakes up.

Man if they applied half the effort to school as to prom, they wouldn't be illiterates. The sense of entitlement that Gowon Bowes talks about, is present in almost every single one of these poorly socialised "mama's lil darlins" whose mama is less than 20 years older than they are.

And as for politesse and manners of the students, here is another Facebook post about the rancid sandwich from Wendy's: "I was ga fuk that hoe up who ever gave me my order I glad I does only by vanilla ice cream". Enough Said!