MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS & THE PUBLIC SERVICE
48TH ANNUAL CONVENTION
PROGRESSIVE LIBERAL
PARTY
WYNDHAM CRYSTAL PALACE HOTEL
21st November, 2003
Mr. Prime Minister, fellow delegates it is once again an enormous honour and privilege to address this annual convention of the Progressive Liberal Party. When the winds start to blow from the north and the night air begins to develop a slight chill, I know that it is convention time. I have been coming to these conventions since 1975 and I still have not lost the sense of thrill and the excitement of it all. And so I am happy to be here.
I wish to say hello to Mrs. and Mrs. Clarence Moss of the Fox Hill constituency who are unable to be here tonight, and I wish them well. Mrs. Moss, or Miss Seva as we call her in the Village, is not well and her husband is with her to ensure her well being. I know they are watching on television. And I wish to pay tribute to the people of the Fox Hill constituency; my many associates, friends, branch and delegation who make this continuing political journey of mine possible. I pledge to continue in such a way to be an example to all who put their trust in me. I thank you all from the bottom of my heart.
The PLP and myself are exactly the same age. I was born in 1953 and celebrated my fiftieth birthday on 5th October just last month. The PLP marks its fiftieth year this month. Birthdays are not celebrations or milestones in and of themselves. They are for a purpose. And I think that the purpose of this milestone is to take some time to view the landscape and mark some more general themes and visions that we have to embrace as we take the country forward into this century.
The old ways brought us here. But the old ways are too slow. If they continue without change, they will retard our growth and development. It is time for us to look to where we are going to be in the year 2023. We ought to set as a goal that we will be a fully developed country in twenty years, by the year 2023. That is an achievable goal but only if we make some changes today and fast.
That is why I fully embrace and I have commended to my Fox Hill delegation the theme of this convention: Transforming The Bahamas, Securing our Future. I have always tried to embrace the cutting edge of change, and I would urge us to get on with the job. The country will not wait. And too many social commentators have been telling us that apart from the lack of access to capital by young Bahamians, it is the business of Government that has been retarding the progress of the country. Government must then look at itself, and seek to get out of the way so our people can get on with the job of enhancing their wealth and thereby that of the country.
I come tonight not with the gift of prophecy, not to speak in the tongues of men or of angels but rather to appeal to the sense of the soul of the Progressive Liberal Party, to continue what it has always done and that is to look to the grander themes and the larger vision of what The Bahamas should be.
So tonight you should not expect from me a report on what the Passport Office is doing or when the Permanent Secretaries are going to be moved around. Tonight, I want to appeal to the grand vision to which those in my generation were challenged to respond long ago by John Kennedy in his inauguration of 1961 when he spoke those prophetic words:
“Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country?”
Within the decade Martin Luther King challenged America to judge a man not by the colour of his skin but by the content of his character. In our own theatre of operation and some two decades later, Sir Lynden Pindling challenged “the men of steel and the amazons of vision” to Step Now into the social revolution".
I was ten years old in 1963 when John Kennedy was killed, having been alerted to that fact by Mrs. Virginia Stuart, now of Grand Bahama but then my next door neighbour in Nassau. Mr. Kennedy was the last and the only sitting US President to visit these shores for an official duty. The day he died was six years to the day before Raynard Rigby our newly elected Chairman was born. Mr. Rigby will turn 34 years old tomorrow. John Kennedy will have been dead 40 years tomorrow. And since John Kennedy made that exhortation, a whole generation of people in this country, notwithstanding that he was not from amongst us, rose to try and meet that expectation.
I remember so well the houses that I visited while nursing various constituencies in New Providence trying to convince the Bahamian people that they ought to vote for my vision of where I wanted The Bahamas to go. I argued for and I continue to argue for the sovereignty of The Bahamas, for the dignity of its citizens, for a liberal democracy where tolerance is a strong virtue, and pluralism and the rights of the individual are respected.
I could always tell someone who supported the PLP. There were usually three portraits in the homes of voters who supported the PLP: one was that of Sir Lynden Pindling, another that of Martin Luther King Jr. and the third was John F. Kennedy.
Tonight, I mention Mr. Kennedy only because the anniversary of his tragic murder is 40 years ago tomorrow and the birthday of our chairman - who represents part of the future of our party - is also tomorrow. Mr. Kennedy was born in 1917. Mr. Rigby was born in 1969. Sir Lynden was born in 1930.
But regardless of the generation into which one is born, the siren call to public service remains the same -- what you can do for country and not what your country can do for you. But that coincidence helps us to make that appeal to a grander theme tonight; to hark back to an era when there was the call to public service as an end in itself. And that is the appeal that I make this evening. The plea to public service.
All the young Bahamian men and women who sit in their homes tonight and are thinking of careers for themselves, there is no better way to serve your country than to answer the call to public service. And in this regard, I am not speaking of the civil service; I am talking about a career in politics. And if you are thinking of political party to join, there is no finer party than the PLP.
But as the Minister for the Public Service, I also say that it is a good idea for people just joining the job market to spend at least a year or two in the early parts of your career in the civil service. The civil service or the public service as it is sometimes called, is the great unifying factor of our country. In our national ceremonies, in times of national emergency, it is the public service that knits us together and keeps us with that strong sense of country. That is why we must continue to build it with strong, well trained and capable individuals and in so far as possible remove all forms of parochial consideration from the process of how you progress in the service. When we talk about public sector reform, we are speaking about removing those extraneous influences while at the same time making the sector more efficient so that more jobs can be created in the private sector.
The frustrations which many young people feel in the service must be addressed by the comprehensive reforms which we envisage, including the use of more contract work for new employees. Some initiatives are being developed with the Inter American Development Bank and other vendors, and with the public sector trade unions.
In this regard, it is important for me to pay tribute to the responsible trade union leaders who participated in the negotiations to postpone the payment of public sector salaries due on 1st July to be paid on 9th December of this year, without disruption to the economy. The government will honour that commitment but there is a corresponding commitment on the part of all of us to continued fiscal restraint and accountability. The negotiations were conducted without rancour, and as part of the social compact that the PLP envisaged when it came to office between Labour and the Government.
Dianne Abbott is a British Member of Parliament of Caribbean ancestry and she asked me a question while at a dinner in London: “There are only 300,000 Bahamians”, she said, “but do you really feel that you are a country?” I recently saw her here in Nassau at the home of Senator Sharon Wilson and Mr. Franklin Wilson and I asked her the same question. Now that you are here, do you think that we are a country? She had to agree that we are.
I say that in a serious vein because when she asked me the question, I was in the middle of publicly defending why we had to adjourn the joint task force meeting between the US and ourselves on 6th December last year. While there was overwhelming public support, there were some sectors of domestic opinion who believed that The Bahamas at no point should stand up for its positions. That there was nothing for which The Bahamas should stand, simply lie supinely flat on our backs and take whatever goes. That sector, largely what I call the uninformed press, has specialized over thirty years in seeking to destabilize Bahamian public opinion, even though they have been consistently proven to be wrong over and over again.
The fact is The Bahamas is a country. We have a way of life. Our own way of life that is unique and different from any other. It deserves to be protected and defended. And when a Minister of Foreign Affairs travels abroad, his main objective is to protect the way of life that we have by increasing the understanding of our country's world view and by attracting trade to our country.
We have a right to that way of life. We have a right to exist in quiet enjoyment of what we have and who we are. No one: friend nor foe has a right to disturb that. Pope John Paul has taught us that each human being has an intrinsic value, and that each human being deserves the right to exist. Power does not justify existence. Our existence justifies our existence.
This country has been a settled territory since the seventeenth century. It has had two periods of occupation. One by the Spanish; a period of one year in 1782 and another in 1776 by the American Navy, for only two weeks. But apart from that we have existed all along as a separate and discrete jurisdiction. In 1973 under Sir Lynden, the PLP brought us to Independence. This is no time therefore to turn back.
The Bahamas must show its face to the world because that is the best way to protect our country. We have no enemies. We have no army. What we do have is that intrinsic right to exist. And this Foreign Minister will fight for it. I don't care who says what, or who does not like what, or who wants us to lie down and play dead, and who thinks that there is some vendetta.
The fact is that we have to stand up for our country. This is a point of which I am constantly reminded by Bahamians across all generational divides. From Loftus Roker of a previous incarnation of the PLP, to Gilbert Morris, one of today's thinkers consumed as he is with plotting the future course of our country.
It is easy to be distracted and destabilized by idle political commentary about traveling too much. It may seem a silly question but it is one that needs to be asked all the same: “What does a Foreign Minister do?”
The Foreign Minister's role is to interface with the outside world, and that means more often than not going to them. It means travel. It is not easy travel. It is hard, back breaking work, filled with physical strain, exposure to illness, danger and disease. But it is necessary travel and it is good work for a good cause. It is work about which there are no complaints. No other country in the hemisphere engages in the kind of debate over such a childish and sophomoric issue while passing it off as intelligent discussion and commentary.
Remember not so long ago when we were in Opposition, we saw the Ingraham administration get this country into deep trouble by not paying attention to the international community. The result is that we were forced to make embarrassing and unnecessary changes to our laws from which the country is even now reeling. And no amount of latter day, ex post facto or after the fact justifications by the fellow travelers of the FNM can justify what they did.
We then have to make up our own minds who and what we are today. When you look back at where the criticism comes from, what I call that uninformed section of the press, you will find that these are the same people who opposed Bahamian sovereignty in the first place. Their grip on sovereignty then appears to be tenuous and some would suggest more motivated by economic considerations than on holding fast to a successful way of life.
Thirty years into our Independence, we know that we like what we have created here. Not perfect by any means but by and large we like it. We want to keep it. And we have to continue to make it grow and develop. That is what the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is pledged to do. It is short on resources, and personnel. It will need your assistance, delegates, to get us the resources that we need to do the job. It is the job we must do, and do the job we will.
And so I leave you then with these words, not about passports and visas, not about transfers and promotions but about The Bahamas and its place in the world. That is my mission in the Public Service and in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to make sure that we are suitably placed in the world community so that we continue to live the good life, which we have enjoyed here for fifty years. No uninformed press, no scandal sheets can change that mission.
The poet Robert Frost reminds us: “The forest is lovely, dark and deep, but we have promises to keep. And miles to go before we sleep. And miles to go before we sleep.”
I make a simple pledge to you and that is to follow that exhortation made by John Kennedy more than forty years ago, to ask what I can do for my country. I ask you to do the same, and ask you to keep on asking and keep on doing. We have miles to go before we sleep as we transform The Bahamas and secure our future.
Next week, the Prime Minister leads his first delegation as the head of the Bahamas Government to the Commonwealth Heads meeting in Abuja, Nigeria. I am certain that you will send your best wishes with him as he represents our country overseas. It is a long journey. The poet said miles to go before we sleep. The support of the country must be behind him.
As we leave, what should be ringing in our ears but the words of that old Timothy Gibson song:
Beautiful Bahamaland
We shall be steadfast and true
Deep our devotion
Profound as the ocean
And as strong as our love for you.
Thank you, God
Bless you and good night. PLP! All The
Way!