Dear Editor,
There was a time in this country when the worst disgrace a man could bring on himself and his family was public shame.
Shame acted as a safeguard against bad behavior. "Don't shame me" mothers would warn young children as they ventured out in public. Others would chastise a person who had compromised their standards or sold their integrity as a "bring down" of the family name.
Political brazenness and lack of shame hit a new low recently when we found out that a man who ought to know better turned a blind eye to a clear case of conflict of interest. It was an attempted shakedown of a businessman whose considerable fortune depended upon the grace and favor of the government.
This perpetrator must go. He has failed at every test he has been given to show that he respects the conventions of our Westminster-based system of government. He has thrown the tenets of accountability, transparency and responsibility out of the window.
He set in motion the

train wreck that we are now witnessing. He corrupted,

either by errors or omissions, the very essence of our political system. For that he must go.
We should not care what fate befalls the hapless Jerome Fitzgerald, a man who is no longer entitled to even the virtue of pity. He is beneath contempt and the voters of Marathon should remove this stain from the body politic.
Our disdain should fall on the man who gave us this shameless beggar, who stooped so low as to use the ailments of his own father as leverage to gain an advantage over other businesses that didn't have the trappings of Cabinet office to gain access to the original developer of the Baha Mar resort.
Fitzgerald is the creation of Perry Christie. Fitzgerald tainted the entire Cabinet and the whole PLP, but it is Christie who must go. Our system sets out four steps that Christie should have demanded of Fitzgerald in the wake of the "beggargate" scandal.
He should have forced Fitzgerald to take responsibility and explain the dubious emails to the public. Having explained his personal failing, Christie should have then demanded that Fitzgerald apologize for betraying the public trust. He then should have resigned or been fired.
Christie had an obligation to ensure that Fitzgerald's nomination to run in Marathon was rescinded, leaving him free to run his family's business instead of lobbying for it from a comfortable seat in government.
Christie is so lacking in fortitude that it is futile for us to expect any other course of action from him. He is the proverbial three monkeys morphed into one tired body. Mizaru covered his eyes so he could see no evil, Kikazaru covered his ears to hear no evil, and Iwazaru covered his mouth so he could speak no evil.
Except that Christie saw all the wealth that some of his Cabinet ministers were accumulating on their official salaries. He heard all of the sip-sip about shady deals and back scratching.
He didn't act when Alfred Gray thumbed his nose at the legal system. He looked the other way on BAMSI. He couldn't speak to the allegations involving his attorney general and her family's purported ties to Baha Mar.
The PLP's dirty linen stinks to high heaven, but nothing on that list is more egregious and lethal than the Rubis debacle that starred none other than Christie's prized pit bull, Fitzgerald. An environmental disaster slowly unfolded in his constituency that affected the health, and possibly the mortality, of his constituents, yet Fitzgerald and Christie looked the other way.
This was only the most serious count in the many charges against Fitzgerald. The man has no shame. He ignored the separation of powers between the executive, the legislative and the judiciary.
Reeking in contempt for convention, this alley cat politician went trawling in a private dumpster and unearthed emails that he found politically damaging to the opposition. Still, oozing the stench of the gutter, he clothed himself in parliamentary privilege and tabled those emails in the people's House.
Not a peep was heard from Christie as the legislature and the courts almost came to blows in what would have been a constitutional clash for the ages. Christie did nothing.
And it's not because Fitzgerald was an exemplar at the Ministry of Education. Under his watch, the national average in mathematics went to E and the average for English was D+.
He will try to steal credit for the University of The Bahamas, but that process was set in motion back in the days when he was still in high school.
Perhaps the greatest source of power that a prime minister wields is his ability to hire, fire, promote or demote ministers. Based on the evidence of the last five years alone, Christie is our most impotent prime minister ever.
Luckily for us, there is a force more powerful than the Office of the Prime Minister. It is the people. The electorate is still the ultimate check on power.
The minnow from Marathon swimming around at the Ministry of Education is bad enough, but the real problem is that somnolent old turbot from Centreville lollygagging at the OPM.

- The Graduate

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