Government is not a person, but rather it is an instrument given to a body of people to uphold the institutions to govern society.  The instrument, which is the law, regulates everything in a society from personal behavior to societal norms.
God in his wisdom has instituted the instrument of government.  The instrument of government is made up of a body of laws.  The laws are a system designed to regulate and preserve and protect the rights of all persons, organizations and nations.  The enforcement and carrying out of the instrument of the law, when it is done in various arenas, brings wholeness and provides for the protection of people to develop and progress in a civil manner.
Consequently, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., one of the most profound and prolific leaders in the last century, stated that "all reality has spiritual control.  And there is a God that upholds and stands behind that reality".
Laws are primarily given to constrain the waywardness of man's depraved and fallen nature.  They are the penal code of man's morality.  Man's morality is designed to bring the best out of every person.  Civic society has various educational and social institutions with systems that are proactively intended to help people discover their gifts and in so doing lend their support to the national development of their country.  It is one's moral and God-given responsibility to actively and creatively contribute to civil society.
So it is in the observing and obeying of these principles, that are the penal code, that a nation is protected from imploding from the activities of lawlessness or being destroyed ultimately by the judgment of God.
God in his mercy towards man has created redemption for him and empowered the church through his Holy Spirit to adhere to the penal code.  As a church conforms to the standards of morality it assists in building its community, society, and indeed a nation.  In so doing, God blesses that nation.  That is why he said: "Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord," Psalm 33:12.
The quality of a nation is determined by the quality of its government.  Characteristically, this responsibility needs to be carried out with respect to loyalty, fidelity and sincerity by those who occupy the office.  The government is accountable for law and order in a civil society; this instrument of accountability has been designed by God.
Therefore, government is not about personalities.  It is about systems and structures and persons being held accountable for positions of trust to carry out specific duties.  Civil society has a right to demand accountability of its elected leaders and appointed or engaged officers.  As a people in The Bahamas, if we do not collectively hold our elected leaders accountable then we lose control of our ability and power to ensure that government acts in the best interest of the people.
 
Collective responsibility
The safety and security of The Bahamas rests at the feet of government.  However, in The Bahamas, we have several areas of government, the executive, the judiciary, and the enforcement agencies.  While the government cannot control what goes on in someone's bedroom, and in our homes and our private space, it is responsible for the control of the collective environment in which we operate.  Government is to ensure that the laws are enforced, applied and fully executed.
The regulation of the law is to be enforced by the government.  Government has agreed to join in the collective responsibility for law and order in our country.  Threats and breaches of peace are the collective responsibility of the executive branch, the judiciary and the armed forces; these all makeup the government.  However, ultimately, the executive branch sets the agenda and brings forward laws that are required to meet the challenges of society, under which the other arms of government function. While collective security is an idea with a long history, its implementation in practice has proven problematic.  Several prerequisites have to be met for it to have a chance of working.  Therefore, the government should have worked on those prerequisites immediately upon taking office so that these should have been satisfied by now.
Before the FNM government took office in 2007, crime, criminality and murder were at high levels in The Bahamas.  A prerequisite of taking office should therefore have been the formulation of a plan to address these burgeoning issues.  Subsequently, in 2009, 86 persons were murdered in our country - the highest occurrence in the modern Bahamas at that time.  In 2010 the upward homicide trend continued and 94 homicides were recorded.  And now in 2011, at the end of 9 months, it stands at more than 104, an increase of more than 40 percent since the current government took office.
The sad thing in all of this is that there seems to be no national plan to bring some arrest to this problem in our country.  Over the past three years the Bahamas Christian Council (BCC) sought partnership with the government with the hope of reducing criminality and crime in our country.  As president, I specifically addressed three of the ministers of the government: Minister for National Security Tommy Turnquest, the prime minister and Minister Zhivago Liang, who I wrote after being turned around by the others respectively.  To my surprise all three ministries did not accept the proposal to partner with the BCC.  As past president of the Bahamas Christian Council, in one of the meetings with the prime minister he told to the church leaders: "You as church leaders do what you need to do and as the government, we will do what we need to do."
Not to mention, the prime minister was not in attendance at the last parliamentary service, which was held at the Salvation Army, Mackey Street.  He sent an apology.  Further, the prime minister did not attend the 2009 Independence service, held at Bahamas Faith Ministries.  Now about six to eight months or so from general election, the prime minister has attended three of the last services held by the Bahamas Christian Council.
As past president of the Bahamas Christian Council, we call on the government to own up to its elected responsibility and to do its job on behalf of the Bahamian people.
We look forward to the prime minister's upcoming address on crime this Monday.

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