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From thebahamasweekly.com - Bahamian Politics
Thank you for inviting me here
this evening. I appreciate the opportunity for the dialogue on
important topics on the future of our country.
Yesterday, I was interviewed
on an Internet broadcast at unscripted242.com hosted by Andrew Burrows,
who is also the webmaster for the PLP's webpage. It was a good
experience. It is one of a number of Internet broadcasts that
are being done by Bahamians. I suspect that these will be increasingly
important as we go on as sources of information and comment.
Each morning, I spend time
mining the Facebook pages because they are an interesting source of
news, the real news that is occurring in The Bahamas. This Facebook
experience is an interesting internationalization of the news from The
Bahamas, where a foreign outlet is providing greater insight into what
is actually happening in The Bahamas than the local media.
One criticism of the regional
media was made by a Professor who spoke to a group of Opposition MPs
gathered in Barbados recently including MPs from The Bahamas.
He said that the local media does not serve our countries well in their
role as national watchdogs. The Internet has served to further
democratize media, in the sense that the dissemination of information
is no longer confined to the ambit of a few.
The social networks on the
Internet in particular allow each individual today to shape an image
of themselves. This has been a liberating experience.
I discovered the usefulness
of the net back in 1998 when I started fredmitchelluncensored.com
which later morphed into bahamasuncensored.com and which continues today.
I often tell the story, and I hope our Chief Justice Sir Michael Barnett
will forgive me for telling this, but I think it makes the larger point
I am seeking to make.
In 1998, I was a columnist
for the Nassau Guardian. The editor then was Oswald Brown.
He did not like my politics and refused to carry the article I submitted
on the grounds that it was defamatory. Suffice it to say, I know
when something is defamatory or not, and the last refuge of an editor
who simply does not want to publish something is to hide behind the
charge of defamation.
I determined then that since
the web was available I would start doing the column on the web.
Sir Michael Barnett, then just plain Michael Barnett, who is a classmate
of mine from St. Augustine's 1970, called me up to ask about the column
and why it did not appear. I explained. Whereupon, he made
this fateful comment: "No one is going to read it on the web."
As it turns out, not two weeks
passed when he called me to say that one of his clients had called him
up and was threatening legal action against me because of certain comments
that I made on the web, but he had persuaded them that instead of filing
a legal action, he would ask me to come in and speak to them about the
client's work. I did and I pointed out the irony of the meeting
in the face of what he had said.
Since that time, the website
has received millions of hits and been read hundreds of thousands of
times. It is a useful addition to the public debate and a valued
source of political information.
Technology permitting then
in these days and times, no writer has to worry about the censoring
of his or her opinion by an editor who decides that they simply do not
like what you say.
It is a curious footnote to
history that the same thing occurs today with me and the Nassau Guardian
where one editor has decided that what I say has no value and what I
say is relegated to the trash box; but never mind there other outlets.
We will one day get to the
point where people in public places understand that there is a difference
between their disagreement with what I say and my right to say it.
As a Minister of the government,
I never confused the two. There were many things that I disagreed
with and the critics were many and I thought misguided but that had
nothing to do with their right to access the goods and services offered
by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The irony of what is happening
at The Guardian now is that if a public official did what they did,
The Guardian would be all over that public official with righteous indignation.
But I digress.
Thankfully, that is the only
paper that has that problem. Recently, you may have witnessed
a similar tack at the Broadcasting Corporation.
Much of this will change as
the monopoly on the dissemination of information continues to disappear
with the use of the Internet.
You can see that the Internet
is becoming more and more important and so the need for us to make sure
that the technology works is imperative. It is important that
ownership of the web is publicly diverse and that there is free and
open access to it.
At first, many public officials
in The Bahamas would ignore what was said on the web. But now
people actually answer what is said on the web. For example, the
then Chief Justice Sir Burton Hall denied a claim made on bahamasuncensored.com
that the PLP had offered to give the Judiciary full autonomy over its
budget.
Lately, Charles Maynard, the
Minister of Culture, announced that he was planning to sue a website
owner or more properly to report the matter to the police for prosecution
of a website owner for various matters that had been published about
him.
The web then is getting much
more into the mainstream and is a great influence on public opinion.
Which is why it is confounds
me that some press outlets like again the Nassau Guardian do not seem
to take the matter seriously. Their site is not properly updated,
nor user friendly. In both the case of The Tribune and The Guardian,
they update the sites much too late in the day trying to force people
to buy the hard copy of the paper. This seems to me self-defeating.
Further, I have personally complained to Wendall Jones about his own
paper's website.
It is clear that we depend
on the web more and more for simple daily tasks beyond communication.
Where am I going with all of
this? I have never forgotten an address made by Nicholas Brady,
a Lyford Cay Resident and a former Treasury Secretary under George H.
Bush of the United States. He made the point at a Chamber of Commerce
banquet that it was important for The Bahamas to get its infrastructure
in place. I remember him distinctly warning that without a reliable
supply of electricity the country could not develop.
You want to say: "Oh!
My prophetic soul!"
I was in Jamaica last week
to attend an Organization of American States sponsored conference on
Campaign Finance reform. I read the newspapers there and Digicel
announced that they were inaugurating 4G in Montego Bay that very day.
4G is the latest standard for
data and voice transmission for the mobile devices.
Sadly, The Bahamas is not even
at 3G and this has obvious implications for data services and connections.
This in a country that prides itself as being ahead of the Caricom region
and of being a leader in financial services.
What is particularly egregious
is that not only is the Internet service provided by both BTC and Cable
Bahamas inadequate and misleadingly provided, Cable Bahamas has still
not fulfilled their moral and ethically bound commitment to ensure that
all communities in this country receive cable television, even as they
themselves have made huge profits from their monopoly presence here
and as they receive TV signals for which there are licensing disputes
and then charge Bahamians for their use.
During the Internet programme
yesterday, we kept getting breaks in the transmission and the data kept
getting lost because of the quality of the service by Cable Bahamas.
I am advised that too often
both BTC and Cable Bahamas promise one speed but deliver another in
terms of the broadband service that they each provide.
My appeal then tonight is a
simple one: to sensitize the public and yourselves to these issues and
to call on our public and private companies to do better in this area
of Internet services. The Government's website is notoriously
slow and even though public servants have been denied access in their
offices to the regular web, the difficulties with the government's websites
continue.
You are all aware I am sure
about the shocking negligence in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where
government owned data was lost and there has been no public accountability
for it save sending the police to lock up apparently innocent citizens.
The democracy has been enriched
by the new technology that is available to us. But we have to
keep ahead of the curve and not fall behind.
It is disgraceful that we have
taken ten years to sell one small telephone company and it appears that
it is to be sold at a fire sale to a company that reportedly immediately
wants to downsize the staff by 40 percent.
We politicians are accused
by some of being self-serving when we speak. Others say that we
do not speak enough. Then there is the call for the mythical third
party that will speak dispassionately. But I always answer: why
complain about the air, when that is all there is to breathe?
The fact is we have the voices we have. It is important that those
who have voices speak up.
Unfortunately, we have fallen
behind in the competition with our Caricom neighbours in services, whether
in tourism; telecommunications; information technology; and the web
and even in government. While we were busy pounding our chests,
the others were catching up and surpassing us.
We must do something to lift
ourselves out of this situation if the country is to advance and the
wealth of our country is to grow.
I hope that I can solicit your
support for my project that of a Vision 2020 in a draft white paper
by the PLP which speaks to substantial investment in education, lifting
the country out of poverty and suggesting a major role for foreign affairs
and international trade. I would be happy to share copies with
you.
It is not acceptable to have
transmissions breaking up. It is not acceptable for the power
to keep going off and the water to shut down. It is not acceptable
to have the level of violence we have in our country. None of
these things are acceptable and all of us must pledge together to work
to improve our present lot. Thank you again for asking me to come. © Copyright 2010 by thebahamasweekly.com - |
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