Addressing the fight between Mount Moriah MP Keod Smith and Kennedy MP Kenyatta Gibson in its weekly website commentary, the FNM hit out at the PLP administration.
“Prime Minister Perry Christie has shredded whatever credibility he had left along with the last bit of respect for his administration by his fumbling, bumbling, indecisive handling of the Cabinet Room brawl between two of his backbenchers,” the FNM said.
The opposition party charged that the incident was a “travesty from beginning to end with the prevarications weaving a web of self-entrapment around the three of them.”
The FNM criticised the prime minister for not immediately coming clean on the circumstances of the fight.
“The damage done to government property from the fight that didn’t happen amounted to $49.50, or so the Prime Minister said. But then a correction came from a public official after the Prime Minister’s press conference: the damage actually amounted to $769.
“What was he thinking? He must have sat in that room at least three times since the incident in addition to inspecting the room the day after. Did he have to be told that Bahamians would not buy the $50 story?
So he should come clean if only on this one point,” the FNM said.
The opposition party called into question why the fight between the two MPs could not have been laid out in the open from the start.
“Everybody in the country knew the two men had fought in the Cabinet Room and in the process had damaged government property. But, to hear them tell it, nothing happened, then nothing much happened, then something unacceptable happened, then there was no fight, then the press was making a mountain out of a molehill, and so on and on right up to the end,” the party said.
Prime Minister Christie has since accepted the resignations of both Mr Smith and Mr Gibson from their posts as chairman of the BEST Commission and chairman of the Gaming Board, respectively.
By KARIN HERIG Tribune Staff Reporter
