All governments use varying degrees of politicking to claim credit for positive and popular situations in the country.
The integrity of a government and its leadership ultimately determine how far it will go in trying to claim credit for key developments.
What the Minnis administration is now having to swallow are both its words and a bitter pill in claiming the COVID-19 situation as its shining achievement.
We found it more than ironic that the Free National Movement’s (FNM) Chairman Carl Culmer accused the opposition Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) last week of politicizing the pandemic.
Surely, the FNM’s chairman has not forgotten that for months until the government was forced by public statements of medical experts to admit to the existence of the third wave, FNM leader and Prime Minister Dr. Hubert Minnis consistently pushed the narrative that cases in the second wave were down because of his leadership.
In fact, while COVID-19 cases and deaths this year were increasing, and healthcare workers were pleading with government to both sit with them, and address personnel shortages and reduced hospital capacity, the band played on for the governing party that was busy praising itself on the ground as the pandemic situation was falling apart.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been fluid to say the least, and Minnis is among many world leaders that have sought to use the pandemic for political advantage.
But let us remember that uncontrolled outbreaks of infectious diseases have causes, though if we ask the current administration, that unqualified cause is always the Bahamian people.
Even the administration’s attorney general has acknowledged on the floor of the Senate that the decision by the competent authority to remove testing requirements for some travelers last year, was a “mistake” – one that history now records as being the trigger to the country’s devastating second wave that caused the loss of well over 100 lives, and significant damage to the domestic economy.
Click here to read more at The Nassau Guardian
