Only a fool, or a person with very deep pockets, would employ a foreigner to operate his business if he could find a Bahamian to perform equally as well. And only business owners – not some civil servant – can decide if there is in fact a Bahamian to meet the needs of their business.
The expense, including immigration fees, to bring a foreigner to the Bahamas is prohibitive. No businessman is going to spend money overseas unnecessarily if he can employ locally. And so when an application is submitted to Immigration for a work permit to fill an essential position in a business, it must mean that the businessperson is desperate, cannot find the right Bahamian and is now trying to appoint the right foreigner.
However, government’s myopic view is that businesses are employing foreigners, because they prefer foreigners. This is probably an inferiority complex suffered by many politicians, but it is not the way a businessperson thinks. He doesn’t spend his money on non-essentials.
For a government that has gone out of its way to woo foreign investment, the attitude of persons like Senator Philip Galanis is economically suicidal.
About three weeks ago the senator urged government to adhere to its Bahamianisation policy and investigate the work permit of recently appointed Grand Bahama Port Authority chairman, Mr Hannes Babak, an Austrian.
To which Tourism Minister Obie Wilchcombe very sensibly replied: “Lady Henrietta St George and Jack Hayward are the private owners, and they are appointing someone to represent their interest. To what extent do we influence that? It is still their personal subjective interest; and we cannot force upon them a Bahamian or anyone.”
Quite right, Mr Wilchcornbe: To what extent can a government influence an owner’s decision when it comes to whom he entrusts his business without driving out investors?
And how can this government tell a private employer that he has to justify a foreign staff member when recently, on naming the Lynden Pindling Airport, it announced that foreigners were going to manage its airport? The irony of it was that the announcement was made by no less a person than the daughter of the governor general, who, when a PLP immigration minister, ruthlessly victimised The Tribune with the so-called “Bahamianisation policy”, because we refused to bow before his “Chief’s” PLP altar. We are not criticising the decision to put the airport under foreign management. In the past Bahamians have failed and so have foreigners.
This new team has the potential of success only if government is smart enough not to interfere. And if the Vancouver company is wise it will have that commitment written in stone, especially if it wants smooth flying at that much-troubled airport.
Government apparently believes it can silence the pen of John Marquis, our managing editor, for whom we have not as yet found a Bahamian replacement, by holding up a work permit that is now six months overdue.
Technologically, these politicians are still thinking in the stone age. Mr Marquis does not have to sit behind a desk at The Tribune to continue to write for this newspaper.
Often we have sat behind our desk in Miami and done our daily work for The Tribune in Nassau. It doesn’t matter whether we are here or there, the same work is done with the greatest of ease – and all deadlines met.
When the FNM first came to power one of its Immigration Ministers wanted to be brought up to date on The Tribune’s training programmes. We were invited to meet with him to explain what we were doing.
At the meeting we took the various sections of The Tribune – main news, business, features, arts, etc. As we spread them across the table, The International Miami Herald was included. “Oh, you can eliminate that,” the Minister said, pointing to The Herald.
“Oh, no you can’t,” we replied. “That’s the whole key to our operation.”
After our experience with the victimising Pindling government, we have been plotting and planning as to how to get out from under dictatorial governments that want to cripple a newspaper that it can’t control as it does the Bahamas Broadcasting Corporation. Daily we have been practising with The Miami Herald. The Herald is prepared in Miami by its own editors and sent over the network to our press in Nassau.
We now know that we don’t need any editors in Nassau. They can all be located overseas – beyond the reach of an over sensitive immigration minister and his political cronies.
Of course, when we do it, it will make international headlines.
And, so, Minister Shane Gibson, the ball is now in your court. Quite frankly we don’t care what you, and your buddies, do. Only do it quickly.
We have prepared so many reports on The Tribune’s training programmes for Immigration that all Mr Gibson has to do is open the file.
Editorial from The Tribune
