A HOME OF THEIR OWN: Prime Minister Philip Davis has lunch at the home of Mr. & Mrs. Garrard and Brittany Lightbourne, catching up on their journey since moving into Renaissance, the government subdivision at Carmichael in 2024. Our photo of the week. 4 March 2026
Nassau Guardian image
The ink was not dry on the Grand Bahama Port Authority’s press release yet when Michael Pintard, the Leader of the Opposition, took to print himself. His cry was: “yes sir massa, you have won”. That was the import of a press release by Michael Pintard as Leader of the Opposition agreeing that the Grand Bahama Port Authority that has failed in its duties to the city of Freeport had won the arbitration over the Government of The Bahamas in its demand for the money owed by the Port under the terms of the Hawksbill Creek Agreement signed in 1955.
The language of the last page of the judgement may have may have led to that conclusion. What it meant was on the narrow point of the specific demand for 357 million dollars, the Government’s claim did not succeed and the fact that the government should have promulgated the environmental measures for the city of Freeport that would be enforced in Freeport. On the broader issues though, the people of The Bahamas triumphed.
The Grand Bahama Port Authority was seeking to claim that they were the lords and masters over Freeport, that the government could not interfere in its governance, even though the government has been carrying the city for the better part of thirty years.
We believe that a mistake was made by the government of the PLP and the FNM in continuing the tax incentives for the city. That has caused these people who own the city to believe that they are the masters of all they survey.’
Chief amongst them is a man named Rupert Hayward whose language is racist, intemperate and does not in fact know his place in a society where he is an ordinary citizen but who believes that he is born with some special privilege because his father and grandfather before him were the investors in the city of Freeport. HE has contributed nothing to what is there today. It is inherited wealth and privilege,
Outside the House of Assembly last week, Michael Pintard was describing the view of the decision by the government as “ blah, blah, blah”. Even the Nassau Guardian in its editorial told him he was off base.
We are really in trouble when the Leader of the Opposition, who lives in Grand Bahama, can see the failure of the Grand Bahama Port Authority but stands up for them, instead of standing against them. What a shame.
Number of hits for the week ending Saturday 7 March 2026 up to mid night: 2;
Number of hits for the month of March up to Saturday 7 March 206 up to midnight: 1,081,282;
Number of hits for the year 2026 up to Saturday 7 March 2026 up to midnight: 9,061,773;
There is a lesson in this quote that is sometime attributed to Harriet Tubman. The historians say there is no evidence that the abolitionist and black American freedom fighter actually said these words but the point for us at this point is the lesson for Michael Pintard, Leader of the Opposition, and all those who are singing the song of “massa” and claiming that the Grand Bahama Port Authority has won in the matter of the arbitration between themselves and the government of The Bahamas. The quote is this: “I freed a thousand slaves; I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves,” There is a similar sentiment in Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. There is a similar comment in the movie Django. There are always some people who just don’t want to be free. They are so conditioned to being subservient that they cannot aspire to anything else but to be a slave. That is the psychological problem that Michael Pintard has as Leader of the Opposition. Very sad indeed.
Cry baby Rupert Hayward. He takes right after his nutty grandpa who used to spout off non sequiturs and insults while he was alive and one of the principals of the Grand Bahama Port Authority. He was a constant antagonist of the PLP and Lynden Pindling. The other partner Edward St George, was the one who would smooth things over. Both Edward St George and Jack Hayward are now dead though. This next generation of owners have no money and they have no talent and are unable to bring any investment to Grand Bahama and are unable to maintain the city up to the standards of their parents. Yet they continue to pretend that they are actually in the saddle. So when the Prime Minister Philip Davis spoke about the fact that he could not allow two families to control the destiny of Freeport, Rupert Hayward was offended. He said his daughter started to cry because her father was being called a paper Bahamian. He claimed he was not because he was born in the Princess Margaret Hospital and his father before him. He should tell us whether or not he is a dual national. We bet he also has a British passport, just in case the natives get restless. Anyway, he had to comfort his daughter he said who started to cry because of this. Prime Minister Davis sent an open letter back to Mr. Hayward and told him that the matter was not personal but that the families the Haywards and St Georges do not have the money to perform the demands of modern city. That the colonial era was finished and with the Grand Bahama Port Authority.
The following is an excerpt from a report by the Nassau Guardian of the words of the Member of Parliament for East Grand Bahama Kwasi Thompson of the Free National Movement about the decision by the arbitrators with regard to the obligations of the Grand Bahama Port Authority and its role. Mr. Thompson spoke in the House of Assembly on Wednesday 4 March 2026:
“I really would not want you to put words in my mouth, but the point that I was making, which I believe would have been accepted by Prime Minister Pindling, Prime Minister Ingraham, Prime Minister Christie, Prime Minister Minnis and yourself, [is] that those positions that the Port Authority had put forward, should have been rejected.
“We accepted that that should have been rejected. In fact, Mr. Ingraham had put in place the BIA (Bahamas Investment Authority). He had put those things in place because we rejected, and those positions ought to have been rejected, so that’s the position that I make and that’s the position that I believe we have. Those things ought to have been rejected.”
The provisions of the arbitration between the government of The Bahamas and the Grand Bahama Port Authority were that the arbitration was private and confidential. This should never have been agreed. The arguments should have been heard in public. The problem now is that when the decision was made, the parties were also bound by that confidentiality. However last weekend, they agreed that the decision could be made public. The Grand Bahama Port Authority wasted no time and put the last page of the decision out and that was the thing that got the headlines. The government had lost the case. After that the PLP was catching up, even though it was half the story. In fact the Grand Bahama Port Authority was simply relieved by the fact that they did not have to pay the 357 million but the fact is according to the decision they have to pay something. We believe that they should be made to pay and their feet in this matter put to the fire.
The following was released by the Office of the Prime Minister of The Bahamas in face of a letter by one of the principals of the Grand Bahama Port Authority Rupert Hayward. It is a letter from the Prime Minister Philip Davis:
5 March 2026
Dear Rupert Hayward,
It is regrettable that questions around your nationality have arisen. Let me start with what has never been in doubt. I have not questioned your nationality. You are Bahamian. Your father was Bahamian. Your children are Bahamian. That is not the issue reflected in “the many documents circulating in this moment.” Further, I am not definitively aware of your “political persuasion,” and “such things” contained in the documents referred to being attributed to me related specifically lies between the Government, and the Port Authority, upon which the arbitrators opined.
Let me also say from the outset that this is not personal. I have said before that I prefer collaboration. For more than two years, I pursued the path of negotiation until the GBPA made a series of decisions which left the Government with no serious choice other than to seek a legal determination.
The issue is the position taken by the Grand Bahama Port Authority, in which your family is a major shareholder, about its standing in Freeport and its relationship to the Government and people of The Bahamas.
Through public statements and in the arbitration, the Port Authority advanced a view of itself that no responsible Government can accept. It claimed a degree of control in Freeport that would place a private company above the elected Government. It resisted the position that substantial sums are owed to the public purse. It argued that concessions under the Hawksbill Creek Agreement allow it to limit the reach of Bahamian law in areas such as licensing, immigration, customs, utilities, foreign land purchases and environmental regulation.
When all the legal drafting is stripped away, the Port Authority’s case was simple. It wished to decide how Freeport is governed. It wished to keep that power in private hands. The Port Authority went further, it counter-claimed, insisting that it had the right to control, without government intrusion, the licensing of businesses, immigration and customs, and utilities, and that the Government was diverting investments elsewhere on Grand Bahama. It claimed damages for such intrusion in the amount of one billion.
In short, it demanded control and it demanded compensation of 1 billion dollars.
My government could not accept that. The people of Grand Bahama cannot be asked to live in a city where a private authority claims a higher footing than their own Government.
The arbitration has now exposed the reality. The tribunal confirmed that the Port Authority carries an ongoing duty to make payments to the Government up to 2054. It confirmed that the Government retains authority in Freeport in the core areas where the Port sought to erect a special shield. The Port entered the tribunal seeking sweeping powers and a very large award. It emerged with a much narrower outcome and a clear recognition that Freeport remains subject to Bahamian law and to the authority of Parliament.
That result matches a wider truth. Freeport is a Bahamian city. It sits within a Bahamian island. Its residents are Bahamian citizens. The idea that any private company can stand above the state, or present itself as a second centre of power, cannot be reconciled with our independence, our constitution or basic fairness to the people who live and work in Grand Bahama.
When I spoke to the Grand Bahama Chamber of Commerce in May 2024, I said I could not explain why the current shareholders of the Port Authority are not more productive partners for Grand Bahama. I reminded them that this was not always the case. Many remember Sir Jack Hayward with respect. His care, his sense of duty and his capability made him a good partner for the city and for the country. My criticism is not directed at the earlier chapter. It is directed at the failure of the present owners to meet that standard and at the posture the Port has chosen to adopt.
For decades, Freeport has operated under a model in which two families, through the Port, have exercised extraordinary influence over the city’s fate. Whatever the logic at the beginning, that model is no longer delivering for many who live there. Too many licensees, workers and families have seen investment stall, services decline and promises fade. In that setting, it is neither fair nor sustainable for the Port Authority to insist on its privileges, to contest its obligations and then to suggest that the Government should pay it for the right to reset the balance.
My responsibility is to every family in Grand Bahama and to every taxpayer across the Commonwealth. When private claims collide with the interests of those citizens, I am required to choose the public interest. That is what I have done and will continue to do.
You have said that the Grand Bahama Port Authority is not going anywhere and that the Government is not going anywhere. On that we agree. Both will remain. What is changing is the framework within which we coexist.
Under this administration, the Port Authority will remain in Freeport under a new status quo and under clear rules. Those rules start from a simple order of authority. Sovereignty rests with the Bahamian people and the Government they elect. Every concession, licence and private agreement sits beneath that principle, never above it.
We are pressing for the collection of sums owed. We are contesting in court any attempt to reassert a theory of Port supremacy. We will be in direct dialogue with licensees, unions, churches and civic groups in Grand Bahama about the future they want for their city, because that future cannot be shaped solely in boardrooms.
I recognise your family’s long association with Freeport and the role earlier generations played in its development. That history is part of our national story.
Freeport’s destiny must be guided first by the needs, hopes and aspirations of its citizens and by the wider Bahamian family to which it belongs. That conviction underpins the course my government has set.
Respectfully,
Philip Edward Davis KC, MP
Prime Minister
Commonwealth of The Bahamas
There is an expression that when you play with a puppy, it will lick your mouth. That is our advice to the PLP now that it has the decision of the arbitrators is in hand about the role of the Grand Bahama Port Authority. All of the licensing powers should be taken away from the Port immediately. The government should pass sunset legislation that will make clear that the families that now run the Grand Bahama Port Authority will have nothing more to do with the city after the year 2054. There should be a poisoned pill in that sunset legislation that will effectively prevent the FNM from reversing it.
It is clear that the United States does not have a moral case against Iran in the war that they and their proxy Israel have started. Iran posed no threat to them and there is a view that the United States was in negotiations and therefore should never have started a war while negotiations were going on. Whatever they are doing, their actions are disproportionate and cannot end well for them. It is always interesting that in their culture the Star Wars series shows the moral tale of empires. They ought to go and review the trilogy of the original Star Wars films to see how a tiny minority always wins over a large and brutal empire.
The following is the editorial of the Nassau Guardian dated March 2026 on the decision by the arbitrators in the case against the Grand Bahama Port Authority:
We believe those who claim that the February 27 ruling of the tribunal that overheard the arbitration between the Government of The Bahamas and the Grand Bahama Port Authority (GBPA) changed nothing are not fully appreciating what has actually occurred.
When Prime Minister Philip Davis stood in the House of Assembly on Wednesday and declared that he intends to “break” the old order in Freeport, we believe he was making a promise that he now has the legal instruments to back up.
After the ruling was made public on Tuesday, the Grand Bahama Chamber of Commerce concluded that the outcome “effectively returns the parties to the status quo”.
The GBPA’s own press release framed it as a stabilizing vindication.
The Free National Movement (FNM) called it a failure on the part of the government.
FNM Leader Michael Pintard labelled the tribunal’s firm dismissal of the GBPA’s counterclaims as “blah, blah, blah”.
That is not a serious response in the aftermath of a very serious decision from someone who wants to lead this nation.
We believe all of these assessments are deeply mistaken.
In the case of the GBPA and the FNM, their words appear to be less frank analysis than a coping mechanism for a difficult loss.
Before this ruling, the GBPA claimed with considerable force that it held effective authority over the daily governance of Freeport.
In its submissions to the tribunal, it controlled business licensing for non-Bahamians, immigration, customs, utilities, land purchases, and environmental approvals within the Port Area.
According to the prime minister, it arrived at arbitration with a billion-dollar counterclaim and the audacity to argue that the elected government of an independent Bahamas had no meaningful place in the affairs of one of its own major cities.
Seven of those eight counterclaims were rejected in their entirety.
That is not the status quo.
The Hawksbill Creek Agreement was born in 1955, 18 years before Bahamian independence.
The latitude the Port Authority enjoyed in that era reflected a colonial world in which no properly elected representative government existed to check private interests on Bahamian soil.
What the GBPA attempted was to have the tribunal endorse that pre-independence conception of its authority.
The tribunal was not persuaded.
It found that the annual review mechanism for the government to determine what the GBPA could owe is active.
And it said it is prepared to determine what is owed for prior years.
The ruling has also established beyond legal dispute the government’s authority to govern and regulate within the Port Area across every domain the GBPA contested.
Yes, the $357 million claim was dismissed.
The government failed to collect under one specific theory while retaining the right to pursue the same underlying liability through another mechanism.
The prime minister was unambiguous about what comes next regarding his administration’s position on the GBPA and the two families that control it.
“We will break that order,” he told the House.
“We will replace it with one in which Bahamian sovereignty is real in Freeport, in which self-determination is a lived reality for the people who call that island home.
“Today, the record of an independent tribunal stands alongside the record of this House. Together they say that the Government of The Bahamas had the right to act, that we were right to challenge an unfair status quo, and that the future of Freeport and Grand Bahama must be written with the Bahamian people at the center.
“Sir Lynden spoke of an order that would bend or break. Today…it has bent. It has bent toward justice. It has bent toward the Bahamian people. It has bent toward the right of Freeport to move forward under laws made in this Chamber. And it will not bend back.’’
The prime minister is clearly in election mode.
But he is correct in that this is historic – not because of the political theater surrounding it, but because of what the ruling actually says and what it now permits.
The opposition argued the matter should have been handled through negotiation.
We are past that.
A legal reckoning has occurred.
The tribunal’s findings will likely shape every future negotiation, every licensing decision, every utility dispute, and every investment conversation in Freeport for the remaining life of the Hawksbill Creek Agreement.
That is not what the status quo looks like.
We believe this may be the beginning of the end of it.
It has been almost a month now since Marvin Dames, the former National Security Minister and now candidate for the FNM, was caught up in a scandal involving his partner Malcolm Goodman being caught with 200 kilos of cocaine in the United States on a boat owned by them jointly and severally. Michael Pintard was quick to talk about the Grand Bahama Port Authority and supporting them over the Bahaman government but has had nothing to say about his candidate being caught up in a cocaine connection that he has denied. The cat’s got the tongue of the Leader of the Opposition. Funny for a man who usually can’t stop talking. The silence on this matter is deafening.
A leader who will not stand.
The subdivision where the leader of the opposition lives is a subdivision known to the people of Freeport as over the bridge on the Lucayan Waterway, Freeport.
This subdivision, like others, in East Grand Bahama has been neglected by the Grand Bahama Port Authority. The property owners in this area suffer in silence including Michael Pintard, leader of the opposition, henceforth, to be known as Mr. blah! blah! blah!
The question is, if Mr. Pintard is unable to stand up for himself and his neighbors in this subdivision, how will he stand up for the country when faced with difficult decisions. I challenge Mr. Pintard to rebuke the Port Authority for not fulfilling its responsibility as a developer and demand action! Stop acting like a groveling mendicate. It is unseemly .
Photos of the subdivision by Felix Sands
Felix Sands
The Price of a Vote🇧🇸
“I voting for my MP again because he made sure my long-standing issue at NIB got fixed.” Another voice replies, “I ain’t voting for him this time. I asked him to help me get a government job, and I still don’t have no job.”
Conversations like these echo across The Bahamas every election season. Too often, the vote has become a transaction — support given in exchange for a personal favor.
Somewhere along the way, the meaning of the ballot changed. The voter is no longer simply choosing leadership; instead, many see the candidate as someone who must first satisfy their personal need/self interest. If nothing was done directly for them, the response is simple: no vote. Representation becomes reduced to a deal — a favor granted or withheld.
Yet it was not always this way. In earlier generations, voting was treated as a privilege earned through struggle and sacrifice. Citizens looked for leaders with vision — people who could guide the country forward, create opportunity, and strengthen communities. They expected leadership, not handouts; representation, not personal favors.
When voting becomes purely transactional, the system itself weakens. Leaders may feel pressure to reward loyal supporters rather than govern fairly. Public resources risk becoming tools for favors instead of instruments for national progress. Trust in government slowly erodes. Corruption becomes prevalent.
A mature democracy asks something deeper of its voters. “Did the MP help me?” is only one question. The better questions are broader: Are our communities improving? Are policies working?Are opportunities expanding? Is the country progressing?
A vote is not a favor to a politician or a payback for a favor — it is a responsibility to the nation to improve the lot of all Bahamians to drive our country forward, upward, onward, together.
-Abigail Cartwright
From Facebook:
Since I’m leaving the Mayo Clinic in the morning, I bid farewell to Rupert Roberts, owner of the Supervalu chain. He was joined by Mrs Roberts, his daughter Candi and his granddaughter Paige. It was a happy occasion for Bahamians abroad. We presented him with a bouquet of flowers and our best wishes again from Prime Minister Philip Davis. 5 March 2026
Fred Mitchell MP
Fox Hill