These Deeply Rooted Troubles

Indeed, [and here of late], the chickens are coming home to roost. Problems that could once be papered over with dollops of money are today surfacing by the spades-full.

Indeed, some of our leaders – inclusive of the Rt. Hon. Hubert A. Ingraham – have been candid enough to let the people know that the current crisis has thrown them for a loop.

And let there be no mistake about it – the problems we face are today rooted deep in a past that was replete with error piled upon error.

Today in this time of economic peril, the proverbial chickens are [indeed] coming home to roost.

As we all know so very well, one day the problem that emerges has to do with a criminal justice system that is dropping to pieces. On another – as done recently – the troubles emerge concerning the delivery of tertiary level education and schooling.

And the list goes on.

But even as the so-called man in the street understands that the times are changing and that he must adjust with them, we have leaders who seem content to while away their time in the production of nostrums, platitudes and bromides.

They are wasting time.

At this juncture, we need leaders who are prepared – with the help of leadership elsewhere in this society – get off dead-centre and therefore and thereafter get on with the business of putting in place plans and policies that are geared to helping our people get up from under the rubble.

Evidently, some of our leaders just do not get it.

In this department of ‘leaders’ who just do not get it, we are today obliged to name Attorney Desmond Bannister – as an exceptional exemplar of a leader who seemingly just does not ‘get it’.

As evidence we need only adduce one of his more egregious pieces of advice that he routinely trots out concerning some purported connections between [good] parenting, education, schooling and success in life.

Banister would have the public believe that his version of the truth is self-evident.

The fact of the matter is that it is no such thing.

Had he taken the time to think more deeply about the matter at hand, he might have asked himself the question as to why it does arise – in tens of thousands of cases – that very many Bahamians do quite well in life despite the troubles they have seen in this life.

And for sure – what is the child to do who has no parent who is either willing or able to help them?

Put simply, who is to help the parent who is in need of being better schooled and better educated.

The reality on the ground – as the Minister himself must know – is absolutely different.

And here the Minister might wish to reflect on the idea that the best schools and the best teachers might well be precisely what failing students need most of all.

Such schools can make a vitally important role in making the difference that matters to all those children who are today being treated with a deadly dose of indifference and contempt – sometimes doled out by incompetent, mean and venal teachers.

This is a far cry from that time in a colonial Bahamas where education and schooling did play an important role in helping unshackle the minds of so very many of this nation’s forefathers and mothers.

Sadly, this legacy of real educational achievement -as epitomized [say] in the life and witness of C.R. Walker and his peers – is today a thing of the past.

In its stead, what we now have is the rankest of careerism on the part of a few who become lettered and professional; and in the same world, we have produced a mass population that is seemingly content to wallow in both ignorance and licentiousness – all of this thanks to a tourism-based economy that was prosperous enough to reward both elite and mass with gobs of money.

That time when money-making was easy is today winding down; fast for some and even faster for an unlucky, unprepared and poorly schooled mass of others who are today mired in distress.

Obviously, no chat by Attorney Bannister about how they should or could do more for their children and how they could and should be helped with their homework now amount to a hill of beans.

These people need jobs.

And even more to the point – there is a question that must be answered sooner rather than later – of what use to anyone is a system that [even now] graduates thousands of youth who are not only innumerate and illiterate; but who also do not have under their belts even the rudiments of a trade?