Focus Bahamians - Focus Bahamas!
Attention Bahamians - Attention Bahamas!
WE ARE EASILY DISTRACTED LIKE INSIPID CHILDREN!
By Professor Gilbert Morris
Nassau, N.P., The Bahamas
I’m a part of 11 chat groups in about 10 countries worldwide. But we seem the worst amongst them in our wasteful shrill partisan vapidity…never seeming able to focus on what’s serious, credible or real.
We seem a people easily distracted into insipidity. With all this country faces we seem enchanted by the same nebula, repeated every three months in the same subject cycle… and yet never do we seem concerned to address issues systematically that would rescue and reform the country we claim to Love.
There is an engineer in a Bahamas chat who has a solution which I have read for our energy crisis, but if he were to post it, I doubt it would get 10% of the responses of a posting that asks was Cecil Wallace Whitfield taller than Pindling. That distraction would be followed with people posting photographs and talking about how you measure distinctions in height by using photographs then running off on a tangent talking about Napoleonic complexes: how height determines leadership and other forms of absolutely feckless drivel by which our mental spaces seem to be entertained endlessly.
Then others chime in saying “oh I was there with Pindling or Cecil Wallace Whitfield when he did a thing”. But they never ask themselves, who was there with you when you did a thing?
It is a form of necrophiliactic dementia how we lurch to dragging up the first majority rule generation…because we’ve done nothing comparable to them…and merely use them constantly to draw relevance from proximity.
Then there are all the constant aggrandising celebratory hosanna’s for absolutely nothing that moves this country towards its potential.
In the film, “No Country for Old Men”, the psychopath asks Woody Harrelson‘s character the most important question in self assessment:
If the rules that you followed brought you to this position, of what use was the rule?
If all that we’ve done for 53 years, brought us to this condition - poor eduction performance, energy crisis, filth on our streets, amongst the murder capitols of the world, slow, inefficient confusing government services, debt and incoming climate crisis - of what use is claiming it as a triumph when others starting later than us with fewer resources surpassed us by others of magnitude?
Some think stupidly and childishly when one speaks in this manner all they hear is we aren’t smart or we are useless. But when a team plays it heart out and loses year after year…the changes that are imposed are not a statement that the players are useless: they played in a system that couldn’t win!
We’ve played in a system that can’t win…because here we are!
When one refers to other states that have done well…we never seem to see it as instructive for us. Some people immediate responses show they don’t understand the logic of comparison. They retort without forethought, saying things like “every country is different”…as if that’s as obvious as a white elephant doing the bachata in a tea cup!
We drag up every mind maiming excuse: they are Asian, they are a dictatorship, they eat velvety bananas, anything to avoid assessing ourself as the country collapses around our feet. But that psychosis is aimed at defending the rules, practises and policies which got us to where we are now…defended psychotically by those who benefited disproportionately…without a reflective or corrective sense.
Every three to four months, as the subject cycle goes around again… someone may post that Singapore’s governing troika is:
Efficiency
Merit
Transparency
The very way in which it’s expressed shows a gargantuan error in conceptualisation. One must always ask what values are operating behind the mantra? When Malaysia broke the Singapore-Malaysia Federation it was because Lee Kuan Yew demanded:
1. No ethnic parties
2. All citizens must share in prosperity
3. The only way to ensure these two is anti-corruption and transparency
These are the values behind the mantra. Lee Kuan Yew and Dr. Goh Keng Swee taught another principle that came before the mantra: “uncertainty”. A scale always has a value you can’t see, a watch is always off time to a degree that you can’t see…what does this mean for political values?
You are never efficient, you’re always becoming efficient; you’re never a meritocracy, you’re always becoming a meritocracy; you’re never transparent, you’re always becoming transparent. Think about what that means…unlike us constantly celebrating pulling wings off roaches…Singapore would launch a programme that dominates the world and their response is…it’s becoming better…but there’s lots of work to do.
Lee Kuan Yew and Dr. Goh used kindergarten and the military service to drill this value into every Singaporean.
That population was not docile…there were riots, strikes, ethnic unrest. It took 10 years to convince Singaporeans to make English the official language. It to 15 years to teach them how to live in social housing. But the educational and military systems did their jobs. So by the time one gets to governance on efficiency, merit and transparency…these are not just terms. They have a deep cultural value proposition that drives them.
Efficiency is systems, methods, rules enforcement; merit is more important than family or political cronies, transparency means exposing even friends…and it means enforcement: behind each of these are governance systems tied to values. Therefore merely listing them does not get at the root of how they are established and function in Singapore. The same is true for Japan, Iceland, Norway and New Zealand.
Singapore’s ranking in the world does not reveal its profound inner workings:
1. 25% of what the citizen pays in taxes is not a tax at all, but an investment for which the citizens receives dividends
2. Singapore airlines is best in the world
3. Singapore’s financial services is based on $100 trillion in FOREX trading that make it one of four money centres in the world
4. People leave UAE have decamped to Singapore: using a similar plan to that which one proposed during COVID’s height, Singapore has created a gold plated retirement programme, yet there isn’t one inch of Singapore that is as naturally beautiful as the worst beach in The Bahamas
5. Singapore’s education is the best in the world, yet they don’t try to fix weakness…they build on strengths
6. Every Singapore child gets $70,000 dollars between birth and 18 toward its growth and development, eliminating the cost to parents for raising children.
Of all the Singapore initiatives that shows its application of “uncertainty”, and the notion of always “becoming better”, nothing compares to its water issues.
One of the reasons the break in the Singapore Malaysian Federation was so devastating was Singapore had no water. In 1960 they launched a plan that would take 90 years to 2050. It generated education and engineering around its problems…is mapped out a strategy and executed: Singapore cleaned up its rivers or natural water bodies, it built the most advanced reverse osmosis, it launched technologies to draw water from humidity and now with 24 years to go, it’s achieved 89% water independence from Malaysia.
As a nation it knows how to get things done. What is more, its citizens believe its government knows how to get things done. It is a country, where problems never get politicised…they get solutions because Singapore is driven by the idea that every Singaporean must be protected from depravation; a principle in the Preamble of our constitution, which no sane person can say we’ve executed.
Our constant frivolity suggests that we lack the cogency required to do hard things…to break out of our partisan mold and to execute on that which is best for the country. Unlike Singapore - and this is critical for comparative logic - we have no guiding ethic or principles and no forum where it could be taught…we chose not to cultivate it and we chose to live to the point that our country stands where it does!
