We often talk about having development that will provide jobs and give us access to a better life. However, these days, it seems that this is merely a pipe dream.
As car jackings pick up pace and murders hit new heights our 'better life' vanishes into a smoke stream. The Bahamas now boasts anchor developments on many of its islands, and everyday we open a new high-end exclusive resort where the rich and famous will come to frolic uninterrupted by commoners.
Once the resort has purchased all the requisite permissions and paid all its facilitators to allow development unhindered, they are free to exclude as they choose. The creep is on. Yes, they may provide some work, but they provide little else.
Ian Strachan talks about the resort being the new plantation. But this is a plantation that we have chosen, we have sought after and encouraged, in fact, often begged to come to our shores. While the resorts are the plantations, government, the local management team, has failed to govern. In fact, government has allowed the creep. Their role of promoting local development has been eclipsed by their failure to manage FDI.
When Baha Mar took over what would have been the Nassau Beach Hotel and Golf Club, once owned by the Crothers family, a space that encouraged locals to mix and mingle with tourists - in fact, Bahamian music was high on the hotel's menu - they quickly did away with the old brand of empowerment through exposure and sharing of local life with the tourists to deepen their experience with the community and the place.
It basically destroyed what would have been the only affordable golf course on the island. The theory had it that locals could go to Nassau Beach to play golf as the round was still within their grasp. The course was not for elite locals either. It was for every man. That vision of allowing locals access to what are seen as elite sports, ended when Nassau Beach closed.
There remain few people who are invested in local access to such sport; sailing still has well-placed local sailors who provide access to all local children to learn to sail. They provide scholarships and free clinics.
Where have most of these initiatives gone? There has been a failure of management. Parents have failed to talk about the importance of our patrimony to their children. They have failed to create family. Family does not just happen, nor does nationalism. What we have is nationalism without a nation where locals can participate in and enjoy the patrimony.
Not only have the initiatives all but disappeared, the very access to land has been vaporizing in front of us. On a recent Guardian Talk Radio morning show, mention was made of the imminent closing of Paradise Island's Cabbage Beach to taxis and tourists. After investigating, it seems that the closing is rapidly approaching and that no person shall cross that land to use the beach again. Such is the language of power!
The creep has been steady and determined. Obviously, something has changed in the big house to allow the only public access point on that part of the island to be erased. Gone will be many local 'jobs'. Much like the disappearance of access to affordable golf that vanished with the demise of the old Nassau Beach, so goes easy access to the beach. To be sure, that beach would probably have always been private; government would have thought nothing of selling the right-of-way to any beach to a much-coveted resort.
When the Progressive Liberal Party took office in 1967, they did so with a mandate from the people to empower the blacks they then represented. A part of that empowerment was to bring people along with the leaders, and to provide access to progress outside of the confines of the credit and truck system The Bahamas had become after emancipation. That dream was apparently quickly laid to rest, and since then, resorts have risen up to dominate the people they claim to be emancipating through wage labor.
Government policy and a desire for development at all cost has led the country into a serious bind where the coast has become locked off from local enjoyment. An instructive study in a 1996 issue of Urban Anthropology by Tilman Freitag shows the serious devastation tourism can have.
"A central thesis of early proponents of tourism was that the industry promoted secondary growth in other sectors of the economy, was a 'smokeless' which industry safeguarded resources, both human and natural, and, being a service-intensive-industry employed large numbers of people." (Freitag 1996: 226)
Tourism is the goose that lays the golden egg. And this thinking has followed Bahamian politicians to where we are today. They have not adjusted their models or their calculations based on other indicators from the real world. In a manner of speaking, all governments since 1973 have led the country to where it is now. We have been locked out of decision-making, because:
"Tourism is almost always associated with the concept of 'development' in the rhetoric of governments, both national and local, whereby the industry is industry is described as a mechanism for the promotion of positive change. Many Caribbean nations consider tourism a major source of revenue to help the further diversification of their economy." (Freitag 1996: 226)
In The Bahamas, as Olivia Saunders noted in a 2008 presentation, there has been no 'further diversification' of the economy. In fact, there has been a major centralization of the economy so that all business focuses on tourism and tourism, as the Minister of Tourism argues, becomes our culture. Meanwhile, locals find themselves displaced from much of the valuable land.
Freitag underscores again
"All too often tourism development is initiated by investors, local entrepreneurs, and especially tourists themselves, without serious consideration of how its impact will affect other aspects of the local economy or sociocultural lifeways." (Freitag 1996: 227).
This has been well illustrated on many Bahamian islands, though till now, not well documented. However, the documentation is slowly mounting. Islanders have embraced tourism because it is often seen as an easier way of life. At what cost does this easy life come, however? In the realm of affordable services, tourism is poor.
Golf is created to cater to an elite that is certainly out of line with the 98 per cent local population. The promise to make Bahamians owners and managers in their own country, is falling flat, unless we count low-cost housing options that end up costing more than a traditional full-cost homes. The impact has become clear. Managers are imported from elsewhere and paid handsomely. Most of those Baha Mar managers were then sent packing when the project failed. But the land still disappears.
Reports from the major tourism islands have shown that pollution is out of control, the services are depleted by the tourists and the way of life has changed. Residents cannot get piped water because resorts drain the pipes first. We now cannot access the beach, old fishing grounds, farming grounds or crabbing areas. We have also destroyed the mangroves so that the fishing industry will collapse. Look at Bimini!
Bimini has fallen prey to large-scale tourism in an uncontrolled way. The resort dumps, takes and uses more than the locals do, but it is embraced. It makes life more challenging than it would be if there were strict controls in place. It has been allowed to grow as it wishes. It damages the mangrove, slowing filling them in; the creep is on. There is no government oversight, or if there is any, it can be bought for a song. We always look at what is done after it has been done. Why wait until the devastation has been inflicted on the way of life and home of a people? The court then says, well' it's too late to put it back to the way it was, let it carry on.
In the Dominican Republic, a case that we should look to for guidance, the population was squeezed out by 'development'. On Bimini, the population will soon be squeezed out by development. On Paradise Island every so often the creep of tourism enclave development to exclude the local population edges more and more toward completion. When will the last public access be closed off to locals?
Ministers talk about jobs. Prime ministers talk about development. The resort promises progress, yet taxi drivers will now have to figure out a new place to take tourists to the beach. All those small businesses, Freitag mentioned that had developed along Cabbage Beach, as good or bad as they may be, have now been undermined by this move. We care little for such change.
Freitag states
"Those who have paid the highest price related to tourism growth in the community are the poor, whose existence is now even more marginalized due to environmental destruction and inflation related to tourist development in the region... Most Luperoneneses are acutely aware that tourism has taken something intangible from them that cannot be replaced, the comfort and sense of belonging related to being a member of a once close-knit community." (Freitag 1996: 255).
We are simply too busy making money and shooting one another to realize this is happening. When the taxi driver, whomever he was, phoned Guardian Talk Radio, he was speaking for an entire people, yet very few people heard him, even fewer cared to listen and precious few bothered to take note. The beach will close in a few days, but what will tomorrow bring?
This closure shows an absolute failure of management and no backpedaling, no matter what political promises are made to buy back beaches -- that should never have been sold to begin with -- will change that. Managers cannot be in conflict of interest; they are there to represent the people and if their personal interests get in the way, they should step away from the table.
People have however allowed this development to creep in so far that if anything can be done it will be very little and perhaps too late. There are no saviors here and resorts seem to do no favors to the local population. They are in business and their bottom line means that they will cut everyone off to turn a profit.
Our failure has been that we have allowed this outdated model of selling land to continue. Unlike other, more progressive countries, like Cuba, where land cannot be sold to foreign entities, we simply give away everything in the hope that we will be allowed to stay on as house servants.
All policies in The Bahamas make foreign investors better off than Bahamians. The plantation is back and we have become mere workers. Even those who give the favors will one day realize that they are as outside as the poor folk they look down on.
o Ian A. Bethell-Bennett is a lecturer at The College of The Bahamas.
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