Dear Editor,
"By hook or by crook" is an old saying that portends that any means necessary will be deployed to accomplish a certain end.
How appropriate then that the minister responsible for fishing has been caught in his own net (again) and is proving to be as slippery as an eel in worming his way out of his own fishy stories.
Bear in mind that Minister Vergeneas Alfred Gray, a member of the Bar, always says what he believes. The trouble is what he believes keeps changing, sometimes by the hour.
The minister honestly believed sometime ago that he did not interfere with the administration of justice in a matter involving some of his constituents. Now he wants us to believe him when he says the government is not considering the grant of Crown land and assorted other matters to Chinese concerns. The government, in a collective sense, probably was not. But apparently the minister, acting in a solo capacity, had the matter strongly under advisement. He believes that he, not the government, was considering the matter.
Never mind all that malarkey about Cabinet government and collective responsibility, one for all, etc.
Gray was merely thinking through a plan to boost fishing and agriculture in a country of 5,000 square miles by calling in a country for whom that acreage would be nothing more than a backyard plot for slash-and-burn farming and a goldfish pond.
Because China sits on almost 4 million square miles, the Chinese have a tendency to think big in designing their projects. Exhibit A in this regard, the still unfinished Baha Mar resort, perhaps because it was too big to undertake all at once.
We Bahamians muse about people with "big eye". They tend to be motivated by something other than altruism.
There are so many layers to unpack in the latest PLP fishing fiasco. For example, why it is that the party that was so obsessed with preserving Bahamian fishing grounds for Bahamians that the first time shots were fired in a hostile action by our defense force (then called the Police Marine Division) was in a stand-off to stop illegal poaching by U.S.-based fishermen?
In 1975, two years after independence, the PLP amended the 1969 Fisheries Act to declare lobster, conch, grouper and other marine resources creatures of the continental shelf. At the time, fishermen from Florida, including a large number of Cuban-Americans, would cavalierly sail into our waters to fish. Paul Adderley, then attorney general, would have none of it.
We came to blows over fish and that was the first test case for the newly sovereign Bahamas. We adopted a law, similar in text and intent as one only in force in the U.S. to protect their fishing.
Five years later, in 1980 we got into hostile action with Cuba over another incident of poaching. We lost four seamen and a 103' navy ship in that dust-up.
So strong was the PLP's vision of preserving fishing for Bahamians that the unflappable A.D. Hanna to this day can't discuss it without furrowing his brow. It moved him to his core. Hanna had agitated for a defense force from the get-go when Pindling was still fixated on the Police Marine Division becoming a Coast Guard.
Twelve years on from that episode, and the PLP did a 180-degree reversal on protecting Bahamian fisherman. The hapless Sidney Stubbs, then a MP and chairman of the agricultural corporation, tried to sneak a few Korean fishing boats past an armada of regulations the former PLP had put in place to prevent such a thing.
Perry Christie was PM at that time too, and I'll bet you a plate of conch fritters if you can find a statement from him about what really happened.
Fourteen years later, Christie is PM again and here we go with a plan to invite the Chinese to put up the money and the "expertise" to teach our people, whose forefathers have been productively fishing here for centuries, how to extract fish from our waters.
But before condemning the PLP Cabinet for engineering a policy flip-flop, let's interrogate the messenger. Gray could have been on a solo fishing expedition without the consent of the Cabinet or even the knowledge of the prime minister. That's just the type of slackness that Christie allows.
What he may have found was a completely well-intentioned temporary civil servant in our ambassador to China, unskilled in the protocol of the public service or even, it seems, the opaque machinations of diplomacy.
Rookie Ambassador Andy Gomez works for Foreign Minister Fred Mitchell and he can't just breeze past his line minister, no matter how deep his friendship with Christie.
Instructions for him to proceed with a course of diplomacy with his hosts in Beijing ought to have come from the permanent secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, not the minister of agriculture.
And Gomez is accredited to China, and so it is baffling how he could initiate discussions on a fishing project with the Chinese Embassy in Nassau. Protocol dictates that the Chinese diplomats in Nassau would first present their compliments to the Foreign Ministry here before entertaining a question from our man in Beijing.
Mitchell is brutishly autocratic at foreign affairs and one gets a snigger out of how this snafu appears to have gotten past him. Mitchell keeps such a tight reign on his ministry that he calls in to local radio talks shows, even while traveling, just to set the record straight. Could it be that Gray intentionally plotted a pincer move to outsmart Mitchell?
Word is that Mitchell plays minecraft on his smart phone whenever Gray makes a Cabinet intervention, such is the level of contempt in what otherwise should be brotherly respect and a display of the good manners his parents taught him.
All of this is lost on Christie as he reportedly spends Cabinet meetings staring at the bottle of "NoDoz" tablets, discreetly placed in front of him before each session.
What is also now unprecedented is the press release from the embassy in Beijing, effectively injecting itself into the political imbroglio unfolding at home. The ambassador put his foot wrong on this one, and the counsellors and first secretaries who support him in the embassy should have advised him against this action.
No doubt Mitchell is on the phone now with his travel agent booking first-class passage to Beijing to set the ambassador straight. Ambassadors speak for the entire government and not for individual ministers. Mitchell is the cop in charge of traffic between ministries and our missions abroad. Full stop.
This plot only thickens. And if you are a lobster fisherman in Spanish Wells, a conch fisherman in Long Island or a weekend fisherman with a favorite watering hole in Andros, you should be livid that the PLP is trying to take your livelihood or pasttime away from you.
If you think the lionfish is a threat to our grouper, wait till you see what $2 billion in Chinese money will do to wipe out our favorite pelagic delicacies.
- The Graduate
Click here to read more at The Nassau Guardian
