|
|
|
|
Last Updated: Feb 6, 2017 - 2:32:04 PM |
Minister of Foreign Affairs and Immigration, the Hon. Fred A. Mitchell conducts a public lecture on "The Bahamas in the world: Public Policy and Trade Issues." (BIS Photo)
|
Nassau, Bahamas - The following is a lecture given by Fred Mitchell, MP, Minister of Foreign Affairs at College of The Bahamas on December 2nd:
It is an honour to be here this evening.
Tonight I want to dedicate these proceedings first to three men: H M Taylor, Cyril Stevenson and William Cartwright. These three men are considered the founders of the Progressive Liberal Party, the first successful and organized political party in The Bahamas. It is the oldest political party and has dominated the political landscape of our country to this day. I am proud to be a member.
Tonight I do so for what I hope is considered a more generic motive and that is in thanks to them for having the courage to do so. Just as in a generic sense I would say to the founders of the FNM, the courage for doing so. Politics is not an easy business but it is a necessary business.
The late Sir Clifford Darling used to say that it is a slippery business. I say it is a fortuitous business but again it is a necessary business. Political parties drive public policy. When the PLP was founded on 23rd November 1953. I was just one month old and a few days. H. M. Taylor was then 50 years old, Cyril Stevenson was 39 years old and William Cartwright was 30 years old. They could have chosen an easier path, given their racial makeup but they chose the road less travelled. That has indeed made all the difference for The Bahamas.
I should like also tonight to remember three of my friends, all of whom have now passed on. One of them is P. Anthony White who passed away last Tuesday 26th November. He was a story teller extraordinaire and was known his latter years as a writer of a newspaper column. But his contribution to The Bahamas was much much more as a political journalist, a vocation that is not much practiced today. He helped to shape public policy from behind the scenes. In that too I remember my friends Paul Drake, an Israeli who came to live amongst us and along with Cyril Stevenson and then later with Michael Symonette and myself ran the PLP’s newspaper The Herald. It was at The Herald that I worked along with him and learned many of the tricks of the trade. He died on 30th May 1994. It was there at The Herald that I met and worked with Mark Beckford who is the last of the political journalists that I remember and to whom I pay tribute this evening. He was my successor at The Herald and sadly passed away as a young man in an operating theatre in Florida on 12th July 1995 now almost two decades ago. I remember them all tonight and pay tribute to their work for an on behalf of our country.
This evening as I discuss this important topic, I begin with a story.
On the evening of Sunday11th May 1980, I was a student at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was watching the evening news on NBC. The anchor Jessica Savitch announced that American jets had been scrambled over The Bahamas because a ship by the Bahamas Defence Force had been sunk by Cuban planes. I ran to the telephone and called home to speak to my parents. No one at my home had heard anything about it.
I then called my friend George Smith, who was a cabinet minister, and he said yes it was true and he added wryly that we might soon be at war with Cuba.
The circumstances were these in the country. When the news got to the capital of the sinking and the buzzing of Duncan Town which happened on a Saturday morning and on a Sunday, the Prime Minister then Lynden Pindling was not in Nassau. The Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Hanna was in the Chair. The rumours circulated all the day Sunday about the fact of the sinking of the ship but no official announcement was made by the Bahamas Government. The news was being broadcast by U S Media. Mike Smith who was the News Director at ZNS at the time, was specifically instructed not to report anything about it for fear of panicking the population. It was not until 5 p.m. on Sunday 11th May that ZNS was permitted to broadcast the story.
The Cabinet met throughout the day but it was not until 12:15 a.m. on Monday 12th May that an official statement was made about the events off Ragged Island.
I was asked by Prime Minister Pindling to excuse myself from University to come home to help organize the public relations response to the event. I came home. What I found was that while there was great pride in the Royal Bahamas Defence Force and our country as a result of the sinking, people were disturbed that it took so long to get the official information out. The Prime Minister at the time asked me to organize a press conference with the international media and local media to give a blow by blow description of what happened. It is what I have come to call ex post facto catching up or patching up. I have been in that situation far too many times in the public life of The Bahamas where there appears to be an institutional and deeply engrained cultural resistance to being proactive and acting in a timely manner. This appears to be the something so deeply ingrained that it is only I suspect through a long term focus through the education system that it might change.
It applies to the dissemination of public information as well as to most other areas of the development of policy. There is resistance to share information. There is institutional resistance to anticipating the future needs of the country and planning accordingly. Those who raise it as an issue are thought to be cranky and out of step with the times. I say tonight that this country can be so much farther ahead of where we are if we can fix this problem.
I call it then the problem of logistics. So as I address the issue of The Bahamas in the world, the central focus of what I want to speak about tonight is about logistics.
I give you another story.
In the summer of 2011, my Branch and the other Eastern Branches of the Progressive Liberal Party were the sponsors of an Eastern Region convention for the Progressive Liberal Party. The event was held at the New Christian Life Centre on Prince Charles Drive. The event was supposed to go on air at eight p.m. The venue was all ready. The people were all there or half way there. The time was eight p.m. but I could see no apparent effort to start. So I went to the organizers of the event and I asked them what were they waiting on. “We’re going to start in a minute, Mr. Mitchell,” they said. I asked them again, what they were waiting on. “We will start in a minute,” they said. “But what are you waiting on,” I asked. “ We will start shortly,” they said. I finally had enough and I said, “No you will start now. It’s eight p.m. and you should start.”
They had no earthly reason not to start, save some invisible inertia.
That kind of casualness with regard to time and planning infects all aspects of our lives and we seem as a people simply to accept it as the way The Bahamas is.
A cross section of society including public servants, COB faculty, staff and students and interested persons showed up at the Harry C. Moore Library and Information Center to hear Minister Mitchell's lecture on Foreign Policy and Trade Issues. The lecture took place on Wednesday, 4th December 2013.
|
I just did a trip over the weekend to two islands using the normal commercial transport that all Bahamians use. It required leaving Grand Bahama and going to Marsh Harbour, Abaco for a funeral scheduled to start at 11 a.m. I decided I would take the ferry from McClean’s Town in East Grand Bahama to Crown Haven in Abaco. That is a journey of 45 minutes normally across the water. The boat was scheduled to leave Grand Bahama at 8:30 a.m. So that meant that the boat should have gotten me at Crown Haven at 9:15 a.m. The drive to Marsh Harbour is about an hour and half so that meant that I should have been able to make the start of the funeral at 11 a.m.
Only problem is the boat did not leave until nine a.m. There was a breakdown of the vessel. So the result was I missed the start of the funeral.
Now in the middle of this, as I am driving from Crown Haven to Marsh Harbour, a call comes to me by telephone from the woman who organizes my Christmas functions in Fox Hill. That is the reason that I had to leave the funeral early and depart for Nassau so I could join my constituents for the annual Christmas tree lighting in Fox Hill.
She called to tell me that despite promises and best efforts, the sellers of the Christmas trees have not delivered the tree, and further that the tree that they do have is not more than seven feet. She asks me what should she do.
I bring this one up because Bahamian business people are always complaining about how bad service is in the private sector. But before I left for the Middle East in October 2013, I made arrangements, spoke to the vendor myself and he promised me to order a fifteen foot Christmas tree. Now not only was there no 15 foot tree but no tree at all.
So in the middle of all of this I had to scramble around and find money to buy a tree that was more presentable and then build a three hundred dollar platform so that the tree, as small as it was could be heightened. Thankfully it all came together. But again, this is a question of logistics and division of labour.
I raise also when I lost office in the year 2007 and went back to private practice and had to negotiate an overdraft with my bank. It took me three months to arrange a 75,000 dollar overdraft. And I said to the loan officer: “I am a Member of Parliament, imagine if I were an ordinary citizen, who would want to put up with this?”
Now back to Abaco.
I was to leave Abaco at 1:55 p.m. on Bahamasair to return to Nassau that afternoon. I arranged to leave the funeral at 12:30 p.m. to go check in at the airport. As I was leaving the church, the aide comes up to me and says that Bahamasair broke down in Abaco. They are unlikely to leave before 6 p.m. There is a Sky flight which will leave at 1:40 p.m. only thing is in order to get it, you will have to pay for the tickets on Sky which are one hundred dollars each.
Now this gets really interesting. Ministers of the government most of the public would think have an endless store of cash to move about the country at will. Not so and the public institutions do not have the flexibility or the ability to respond at short notice to demands of the archipelagic nature of our country. So with my having to be back in Nassau for a public function in my constituency at particular time, I have to reach into my pocket and pay for both my aide and myself to travel back to Nassau in the hope that at some point the money for this official travel will be reimbursed.
Such are the vagaries of public life in The Bahamas.
That is but one example.
By the way even the Sky flight was late leaving Abaco so I got to Nassau one hour after I was scheduled to be there.
We lost office in 2007. We left in place a system of decision making which we despite our best efforts could not change in the period 2002 to 2007. When we returned to office in 2012, the country had moved on in leaps and bounds in many other areas but the decision making apparatus of the government was the same as when we left it 2007.
Our decision making is driven by long meetings and long papers on various subjects and then there is a conclusion which must be generated before the public service begins to act. At each point along the way, there are serious choke points to the timely delivery of the services which the Bahamian public demands.
Bahamians travel all over the world. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is tasked with ensuring that this travel experience whether for business or tourism is seamless around the world. It will require more attention to being proactive and to logistics and to thinking about how we actually conclude and execute the decisions that we make.
Bahamians come back home filled with admiration for the societies of the United Arab Emirates and in the UAE Dubai in particular, filled with admiration for what has been accomplished in Singapore and in China but the thing that all of those societies have is a commitment to planning, to looking toward the future and to executing a strategy which has them ahead of the curve.
The question is can we do this here in The Bahamas? There is no reason why we cannot.
It appears to me that there has to be a new way of thinking on these issues. It is revolutionary only in the Bahamian context. How about a commitment to starting things on time, and not dragging things on into endless meetings without making a decision? In our own sphere of foreign affairs, it is for our institutions coming to accept that foreign affairs or immigration for that matter are not cloistered subjects for the favoured few. It will be a recognition that there is a responsibility to interface with the public and that we have a responsibility to account to the public for what we do and say.
I commented publicly that it surprises me the number of public officers who do not even read the newspaper on a daily basis or listen to the Bahamian news. They do not know that there is something in the news or the social media that affects the work in immigration or foreign affairs may require a response and the need to constantly fill the space unless it is filled with nonsense.
Of course, the public service is so hierarchical that often the ordinary entry level worker is not supplied with a newspaper or computer access, because it is not seen as a tool of the trade.
Two months ago, one of the newspapers published a story and more recently there was another story about expenditure by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The stories are completely false. Yet there has been no institutional response to these stories. We know from experience the last time that our political opponents were able to defeat us the strategy of death by a thousand cuts or more properly a thousand lies which we ignored to our peril.
No! 1.5 million has not been spent by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on travel. No 10,000 in cash is not supplied to the Minister of Foreign Affairs on travel. And what an idle and silly debate for a supposedly sensible population to be engaged in: the question of whether a foreign minister travels. The issue is stupidity in its purest form.
No the Prime Minister did not take a Bahamasair jet to fly to New York for the UN address. No there has been no excess expenditure on travel at all. No the reception at the United Nations did not cost 60,000 dollars or anything near that figure. Everything within budget. So the whole thing is just one lie after the next which is being done for political purposes.
But my point is we must answer and leave no space unfilled.
But we live in an age when rational arguments do not persuade public policy. You see for example how the campaign on VAT is being waged. It is from the same playbook of the successful defeat on the Caribbean Single Market and Economy of 2006. It convinced me that consultation is not the way to go in these matters. The government has been elected to govern and should do so, making the hard choices to move the country ahead, not looking left or right. If we do not act on this and so many other matters of national importance, the country will be set back and the programmes delayed to the detriment of the people of the country.
We have to seek to find out how to overcome the institutional inertia on so many public issues. Why does it take for example a year or more from a decision to hire someone in the public service before that person can start work?
How can a country survive in the current era when our processes for decision making are stuck in the paper trail mode of the 1960s and so deliberative that even the most routine decision takes months to make and then more months to execute?
In my youth, the great challenge of our time was the question of whether or not this country could be an independent country. We now know that it can be an independent country but there are issues which the younger and upcoming ones must seize to so transform our country and bring it into the 21st century era.
I would like it for The Bahamas to become a republic. That however has not lit any fires anywhere. Tonight I want to suggest that perhaps we ought to fight for the transformation of the culture of inertia in our country to a culture of proactivity, in other words to pay more attention to logistics. How we have organized our country!
At every level of the country to build in greater efficiency in the management of our time and of our decision making.
This country could be wealthier than it is, if we were much better organized.
It is attracting people from around the world but the product does not match up with the expectation which we sell abroad. There is no sense attracting people to this place if we cannot meet the expectations of the world about what we are selling. We have to fix the product at home.
Tony Blair for example once said that he could not imagine why a Cabinet meeting had to take more than 45 minutes. There was the heavy use of Cabinet committees to move the work of the government forward.
I will give you another example of how our national life is affected by this and why we must seek to fix it. The question of the attitude of people to the commitments they make and the issue of getting somewhere on time.
It is the bane of my political life. I cannot tell you how many times I have been stood up by people, mainly younger people who tell you: I will come by at such and such a time. They never show up. They don’t apologise for not showing up. Or they show up late and there is a casual indifference to the fact that they are late. Think about the number of Bahamian weddings that you have been invited to for example and the wedding is supposed to start at 11 a.m. and one hour some times and hour and half later you are still waiting for the ceremony to begin. There is no respect for other people’s time.
Just this week, a young constituent who is seeking a job in the public sector asked my assistance in obtaining a medical certificate which is one of the requisites for obtaining a job in the public sector. I arranged with a doctor who is a friend of mine to see him which avoided the cost of the medical certificate to him. I set the time which he said was convenient to the constituent. It was for ten a.m. on Tuesday last. At nine fifteen, he indicated that his ride had not shown up and so he would not be able to make the time and could the doctor set another time. Again no thought for the doctor’s time, my time, my reputation put on the line for him and no thought of how he could have made alternative arrangements to get there.
This speaks of course to the need for a public transportation system for our country. Because workers need to get to work on time and in so many cases young workers without cars are having to hitch rides to get to work and are always late to their jobs.
In New York, my sister’s children have been independent of her in terms of their means of getting around since they were 12 years old. They simply get on a bus or a train which is safe and clean and they can get to any destination in the city on time.
Or the example of the youngster 18 years old, he asked me to help him find a job. He has no BJCs, no BGCSEs, and no skills. I obtained a labourer’s job for him. The employer called me the first day of work to say that he did not show up for work. When I called him to ask why he said that the job was too far, and he did not have any trans and could I find something closer to where he lived. But he never thought to call me to tell me that he had a problem. He just didn’t show up. This is in an island where nothing is more than one hour away by bus or two hours away if you walked it.
One last story on this: an air conditioning company asked me to identify five people to work as apprentices for two years to train as air conditioning technicians. The names were identified. They were called. They agreed to come to interviews. Not one of them showed up. No apology. No explanation to the potential employer or to me. They just did not show up.
This is the potential work force then that the international community is being asked to embrace when we go out in the international arena and try to attract investment to The Bahamas.
This is why we now have this National Training Agency and one of the first aspects of what we are doing with that agency is to work on this culture of “don’t care” or disregard for time and for their word.
In my work in the public sector, I think that
part of how we can address this issue of timeliness and efficiency is by a division of labour. This idea of all the public officials descending on one event while the whole government comes to a halt should stop. I have made this observation about the state recognized funerals for example.
I try to tell the staff that my role as foreign minister is to be sure that when the PM arrives somewhere he has a seamless entry and all is prepared. That does not mean running down to the airport to fraternize with him or joining his close circle and that of his family. Familiarity does breed contempt. That my role is to ensure that I am thinking and acting ahead of where he is headed so that when he gets there all is done and well for him. My role is not a social role or to fraternize with him. So immediately when I am on the scene with the Prime Minister my mind is not on the present but on what are we doing next and are the arrangements in place: his travel, his entry through the airports, his arrangements at the hotel, his meetings, his briefings. I am not there on a social jaunt. Imagine the Prime Minister arriving in some foreign country and no one knows he is arriving or that no arrangements have been made for his stay. Yet this has happened in the past. It reflects adversely on the country. It makes us look disorganized.
Similarly, the foreign service is to be so organized for the Foreign Minister’s work as well. The Ministry of Finance and its arrangements are a part of this was well. The ability for the foreign service to be able to move quickly and seamlessly has a to do with the need for improved procedures by the Ministry of Finance.
When the foreign minister travels he has to be firmly tethered to the motherland. The technology is in place to do so. The need to communicate what is happening at home. The logistics of travel: a good phone service which we now lack.
Some foreign ministries separate completely the role of the Minister and that of the public officials in this sense. The Minister never deals with money. In our system where Ministers often have to travel around with wads of cash, this is fraught with difficulties. This seems so archaic at a time when debit cards are available and acceptable in most destinations and provide all the answers to control and accountability.
The South African Foreign Minister for example is led by an advance team that sets up the hotel room, ensures that arrangements on the ground are suitably made and when the Minister leaves that all the bills are paid. The Minister never deals with money save for his or her own personal expenses. That way the accountability for government funds is not the politician’s responsibility but that of the public official.
There are two parts to this then. There is the issue of the communication with the public and the public’s right to know. There is the need to fix the issue of our attitudes and values in the culture of our country to make us a faster quicker better leaner machine. This evening at the College I wanted to put all of this in the public domain as we think about our place in the world.
We cannot sit here in The Bahamas and believe that the world revolves around us and that the world will come to us. In our recent trips to the Middle East and the Far East, we found out that although many people have heard of The Bahamas that they only had the vaguest idea where The Bahamas is and most people who knew where it is think that we are one of the states of the United States of America. So when we go out to get investment to the country, we have that identity problem to fix, and then we have the issue of what it is that we offer. What we need to be able safely to offer to the world is a well-trained work force; a proactive country with an eye to the future and a government that makes timely decisions that can be executed by the public service without prejudice, corruption or unnecessary bureaucracy in the context of a society that believes in the rule of law. That is the context, the thrust of all I am trying to say here this evening.
Some of this, maybe even much of this can all be fixed with money but money will only come in abundance if we fix these problems. People like me have to use the bully pulpit that we have to try and hammer this lesson home. The larger plan for our success must unfold. The Bahamas has to be more self-assured and understand that it is part of a bigger world and restrain itself from acting like we are an isolated island people. For example instead of complaining about the immigrant crisis, our leaders should turn the crisis into an opportunity.
You just need to study the United Arab Emirates that we now so admire for their economic success where 80 per cent of the people who live and work there are non- nationals of the country.
In terms of our decision making, I think Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink pretty convincingly shows us that deliberation as opposed to acting with dispatch has no greater chance of success in life. So you should act with dispatch. That is where we are in The Bahamas today.
I need also remind you what one Caribbean Prime Minister said to our own Prime Minister when advising him to take a rest. He said if you drop dead, I will come to your funeral, sing three hymns and a psalm, go away and say what a good fellow you are but the work and life will continue. So our decisions in public policy and the execution of those policies should be done with dispatch. Time will not and does not wait for us. someone will carry on the work anyway so you may as well go ahead and do what you have to do.
May I then at this juncture stop the lecture and trying and pull all of these threads together in some suggestions for us all.
In our public life and in the development of public policy I suggest the following:
-When people come to us let us fix the problem, not pass it off to someone else not tell them no but find a way to say yes. People come to me about visas and work permits in the food store on the streets. My routine is to pass it on to the public officials. The public officials should fix the problem. Too many times, it comes back: Mr. Mitchell I never heard from so and so. No one answered the phone or no one returned my call or my e mail was ignored. We are in a service business. So fix the problem.
Secondly, try not to be influenced by prejudice and ex parte pleading. I tell those who work in my constituency office: that I serve the blind, the lame, the gay, the straight, the Baptist as well as the Catholic and those with no religion at all. The service should be delivered with equanimity. I encourage people to be neutral in their views when it comes to serving the public.
For me this becomes particularly important against the backdrop of a startling report that came to us that as many as 60 per cent of those in the management of the public service simply do not want to take instructions from the Progressive Liberal Party.
Thirdly avoid ceremony and time wasting. Cut to the chase and get the job done.
My colleagues in the Parliament now treat what I say and do as an idiosyncrasy but there is a method to the madness. I have said that if it is one thing that I would like to do in the public life of The Bahamas is to confine our ceremonies to one hour. So much time is wasted by meetings that go on endlessly and without a conclusion. I have never met a population that likes to meet so. Have you ever tried to get a bureaucrat on the phone only to be told that they are in a meeting. When is there time to interface with the public that they serve?
So tonight while we think about our role in the world, let us think about the revolution in values and attitudes that I believe it will require to take us to the next level.
I thank you and the College of The Bahamas for your kind invitation and attention.
© Copyright 2013 by thebahamasweekly.com
Top of Page
|
|
|
|
