Allow Bahamians To Buy 100% of the Bahamas Telecommunications Company Limited (BTC) and Let Competition Reign!

By Dennis Dames


About eleven years ago, my wife, along with hundreds of BaTelCo employees, accepted the company’s severance package; the deal was, according to my understanding, to prepare the entity for privatization.

That was sometime in 1999. This is now 2011, and the people’s government of the day has selected a candidate to purchase a 51% stake in the ailing BTC. The masses should be delighted about the good news; but ruckus has clouded the issue at hand and the nation has become bitterly divided over this simple matter.

Okay, let Bahamians buy the entire BTC (100%) and liberalize the market forthwith. Let competition reign!

No one in this 21st century Bahamas should have a problem with that. After selling BTC to Bahamians and giving other Bahamians a chance to compete with it, I wonder what the noise in the market would be then.

Let’s go that route, and give the consumers an immediate choice as to which telecommunication company that they would prefer doing business with; just like the local radio stations that we choose to patronize.

We have had a fax-line problem at our office lately, and it took five different technicians from BTC, on five separate visits to remedy the problem. What a national disgrace!

This is what the unions are fighting to keep; pure incompetence alive at the public’s expense.

It’s time for The Bahamas government to divorce itself of this ineptitude 100% as far as BTC is concerned. So, sell it to Bahamians with money to burn and liberalize the market simultaneously for other Bahamians to capitalize on BTC’s uselessness.

I can’t wait to see the unions demonstrate against Bahamians and competition. Then we shall see their real motives clearly; and that is to protect their lot of backward comrades.

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