No matter the party identification of the government of the day, policy choice in The Bahamas is hemmed in by a number of constraints and variables over which the government has control. This too is a part of the reason for much of the bluster that accompanies political debate in The Bahamas.
One of the more enduring aspects of politics in The Bahamas is the extent to which all political parties, factions and fractions of political parties are agreed on the fundamentals of what matters economically, socially, culturally and politically.
It is this unanimity that so neatly explains some of the other aspects of what passes for political debate in The Bahamas. It also quite neatly explains the Bahamian penchant towards hyperbole in political discourse, with every development being described as being transformational or revolutionary.
The people who do matter most in an election in The Bahamas, namely the voting public will have the last word. We believe that the Bahamian people want real answers to their real questions as to how their country is to fare in a world over which they have so little control.
There are times in life when reference should be given to certain facts that matter no matter which party holds the reins of power in The Bahamas. Among those so-called ‘fundamentals’ would be issues that involve certain givens.
There would be certain realities as they relate to the capacity and creativity of the public administration. These questions are enmeshed and embedded in a nest of other socio-political realities.
Indeed the interested observer need only take note of the fact that the public administration has never been a real agent of change in places like The Bahamas.
The public sector workers who come under the rubric ‘permanent and pensionable establishment’ have long been content with protecting their entitlements and seeing to it that no one ‘rocks the boat’. To their way of thinking, this category of ‘no one’ would include the ilk of any politician who would wish to break with precedent.
There are today any number of senior civil servants worth their salt who would and could regale all and sundry about amusing episodes and encounters they have had with politicians, particularly Ministers who -quite literally- ‘come and go.’ In the meanwhile, the bureaucrats controlling the governance system literally go and grow from strength to strength.
What makes this issue so very potent today is that there are any number of indicators to suggest that the Christie administration’s brave new agenda -as outlined in the Speech from The Throne- might yet be hamstrung by a lethargic and bloated public bureaucracy that is simply not up to the task set for it by the political directorate.
This is not to suggest -even for a moment- that this somehow is either ‘deliberate’ or ‘political’. Facts on the ground suggest that this is quite ‘literally just how it is in the real world where real decisions have to be made by real people. The public sector just does not have the capacity to do all of the things the politicians say they must deliver.
It is therefore interesting that at a time when there is a real need for Public Sector reform in The Bahamas, that the speech from the throne said nothing about it. It merely states that an Institute for Public Service Training will be created.
If our Public Sector is bloated and inefficient, the responsibility to correct the problem lies with the government of the day.
In the ultimate analysis, then, politicians might wish to temper some of their more exuberant rhetoric and focus their minds on the truth in the aphorism that politics is concerned with ‘the art of the possible’.
Editorial from The Bahama Journal
