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Publishers Statement

September 16th thru 23th

Dr. Daniel Johnson

 

What now for the Bahamian Young People?

 

September is that month; longer than February but shorter than the other ten; which jolts all of us to the new energy of the official start of the school year. 

 

We awake to roads clogged again with students and parents, breakfast counters with longer lines and a cacophony of school uniforms “kriss krossing” all over the country. And politicians frantic in their “Back to School” giveaways. 

 

Students leaving to study abroad for the first time or to continue their development are also packed and heading out the door in September.  The expense of parents getting their kids ready for the September school shuffle cannot be over stated. In many ways it is just as demanding on the purse strings as the fast approaching Xmas season.

 

It got me thinking.  Seeing hundreds of these young people; from kindergarten to University level- on their journey- just what will the nation have to offer them? What are we putting on lay away for this ambitious cadre of younger Bahamians to draw from? Where is the masterplan?

 

I can relate to my own school experiences and tell you that dad and mummy let my siblings and I know every waking day we were not being sent to school for sent to school sake. NO! We were being sent to school to get an “EDUCATION”.

 

I think by grade six you finally begin to understand what this big word “EDUCATION” means when you are confronted with examinations to enter high school and all you have been pressing your nose and eyes into the books for over the past six years is going to come down to written tests.

 

All of us can relate to good friends we made along the school journey. The lofty ambitions and dreams of parents echoing through their kids. We can relate to the early starters who aced every exam and the never starters who did best kicking a soccer ball or serving a volley ball and winning over the prized girl or boy. 

 

We can also relate to so many dreams we heard back then which are still marked “deferred”.

 

Dreams of kids from our church, our community, our immediate family; which never got the fertilizing water of higher encouragement to bring them to reality.

 

We know the HAVE’S who seemed to have it made, no matter what; and the HAVE-NOTS who had extra miles to go and extra burdens to carry.

 

I suppose the same is the reality which the kids of today will encounter and this is where and why I ask the question, “WHAT NOW FOR THE YOUNG BAHAMIAN PEOPLE?”

 

Having sat so long for their EDUCATION, what does this country offer them?

 

We have this super Tourism plant in the capitol- Baha-Mar and Atlantis.

 

A state of the art new Cruise Ship Port.

 

Visitor arrivals by sea and air are breaking their own records every day. 

 

The Sir Lynden Pindling International Airport is a thing of pride.

 

Freeport is gearing up for a revival. 

 

In the Family Islands, industry and thrift remains commendable.

 

Yet Crime levels are exceptionally too high.

 

Crimes of violence amongst juveniles and by juveniles against adults is at staggering proportions.

 

The “Right Reverends and the Wrong Reverends” are in their own echo chamber.

 

The HAVES are a scarce and miniscule proportion of numbers and the HAVENOTS continue to outgrow their marginalized and over crammed spaces.

 

Commerce seems to have been taken over by NON BAHAMIANS.

 

Africans are selling cars and patching tyres.

 

The Chinese are selling everything and all things and are in every available commercial space.

 

The Indians have captured Bay Street.

 

The Filipinos get all of the domestic work in the luxury gated communities.

 

The Jamaicans have cosmetology shops on lock. And other more lucrative business as well which mature audiences can ponder.

 

The Haitians… well let’s just give them all the blame.

 

The commercial banks and soul less technology is drowning us.

 

Statutory instruments and authorities like the Central Bank and antiquated protocols are urgently in need of over haul.

 

Meanwhile back at the ranch; the “lil man” is all worked up over “what fall”; “who sleeping with who”; and what he can readily recite from his Bible and disabuse from the Constitution.

 

Behind the veil of all of this is a Bahamian “front man” or entity on a salary for a public relations exercise in the duping of the Bahamian people.

 

How much longer will this most untenable set of economic circumstances be allowed to continue?

 

“Not Long!” Ralph Abernathy used to reply to Dr. Martin Luther King Junior.

 

To have come this far in 50 years post national independence to be hewers of wood, toters of water and mere customers in the large equation of the vast economy of this country; is beginning to set off ripple effects.

 

Burma Road did not just happen.

 

Pindling’s “Bend or Break” ultimatum did not just happen nor was it ever ideologically exclusive to Freeport.

 

Sidney Poitier, our super star made us all immensely proud back in the day with his performance in Langston Hughes, “A Raisin in the Sun”.

 

Other black actors like P. Diddy Sean Coombs, Denzel Washington have appeared in the same role Sir Sidney played, on the big screen and on stage in that epic.

 

The September mornings brought me back to that poignant voice of Langston Hughes in “the Harlem” renaissance which my father loved repeating:-

 

 

“What happens to a dream deferred?

 

     “Does it dry up?

      Like a raisin in the sun?

      Or fester like a sore—

      “And then run?

      

“Does it stink like rotten meat?

      Or crust and sugar over—

      Like a syrupy sweet?

 

“Maybe it just sags

      Like a heavy load.

 

      “Or does it explode?”

                       -Langston Hughes

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We should not wait to get the answer or to guess an answer when the facts are clearly and evidently in front of all of us.

​

“What now for the Bahamian Young People?” 

See you next week.