On Federation (22 September 2003)

Great minds, they say, think alike. Well, I’m not claiming to have a great mind, but I’ve been struck by the fact that one of the recent discussions that’s been happening on air and in cyberspace is one in which I have an abiding interest. It’s the idea of extending local government, of decentralizing our administration as far as possible, of broadening democracy by giving all Bahamians an immediate stake in their government. Thanks to Vince Ferguson, Steve McKinney and others, these ideas have entered the public’s consciousness.

I have long been dissatisfied with local government as it exists in the Bahamas. What I want to talk about today is similar to local government, but bigger. I’m going to propose that we Bahamians start thinking about becoming a federation.

I can hear the scoffing now; the idea of federation for the Bahamas must seem absurd. A federation, after all, is usually a union of pre-existing bodies who agree to come together to form a single greater body. When governments are federal, they usually unite several pre-existent states. The Bahamas, you might argue, is not like that. It has always been administered as a single unit; the islands are separated by water, not by politics. If ain’t broke, why fix it? Why risk all kinds of problems we never bargained for?

Well, for several reasons.

The first is size. The Bahamas is physically the largest country in the Caribbean region. In fact, the entire landmass of the Bahamas is comparable to that of Jamaica or Wales; and when you pour the sea into the mix, the size of our country is similar to that of Guyana. At the same time, The Bahamas is remarkably underpopulated. Two and a half million Jamaicans and three million Welshmen occupy the same landmass that we have here in the Bahamas; our population officially stands at just over 300,000 — the size of a tiny American city. And as long as all government and infrastructural services are based in that capital, we are going to stay that way.

That brings me to the second reason: Family Island development. Each administration has a different strategy. The early PLP focussed on providing much-needed infrastructure; the FNM on setting up local government; the new PLP on directing foreign investment towards the islands. However, what no government has yet recognized is that the success of these top-down initiatives is bound to be limited. They tend not to involve the people who will be most affected by them, unless it is in a very restricted capacity, or very late in the game. And as a result, young Family Islanders continue to move to the cities in search of education, jobs, and a twenty-first century life.

The third reason is overall national cultural development. The way in which the Bahamian nation is currently administered recalls the way in which the British Empire was administered nearly a hundred years ago. A group of bureaucrats in a metropolis make decisions that affect people in far-flung territories. The reasons behind those decisions very rarely have much to do with the inhabitants of those territories, unless it is to provide them with jobs (and to secure loyalty and votes in the process). One case in point is the disbursement by politicians in Nassau of Crown Land in the Family Islands to international investors. The short-term returns may appear considerable; but in the long run (as Nassauvians have learned with the loss of Paradise Island and other major beaches), more may be destroyed for future generations than is built up.

In short, central government has stultified the growth of the entire country. It has made Nassau both richer than the rest of the country and hopelessly inefficient; Nassau can no longer rule itself, let alone the entire archipelago. If the nation is to continue to grow and prosper, a complete devolution of power from the centre must take place.

And I propose a federation instead of local government. In its present form, local government achieves very little for most islands except collect taxes for the consolidated fund. Rather than administrative districts, islands or groups of islands would form states or provinces, each with its own elected leader, legislature and judiciary. In Canada, each province has its own Parliament, its own Premier and its own Lieutenant-Governor to administer local affairs; each American state has a Governor, a Senate and a House of Representatives. Each Bahamian state could be similarly constituted.

But that is the easy part of the concept. The difficult bit is deciding which affairs would be the responsibility of the federal government, and which would be controlled by the states. In the vast majority of cases, federations maintain control over customs, immigration, defence, finance, and foreign affairs. In addition, most write federal laws that override the wishes of individual regions, and deal with issues that go beyond local jurisdictions. Federations also maintain national law enforcement bodies — in the USA the FBI and the DEA are examples, in Canada the RCMP. Social security and welfare systems may also be nationally controlled, and federal governments generally bear responsibility for the communications systems that unite the country — the interstate highways in the USA, the railways, the airspace; in the Bahamas we would have to add the shipping lanes as well. Some federations also maintain jurisdiction over, or set standards for, education, healthcare, land use and broadcasting. However, what very few federations control are utilities, commerce, economics and the like.

So what would be the benefits for the Bahamas? In the first place, only a radical move such as federation is likely to move large portions of the urban population to the Family Islands. Current initiatives are too narrow in focus, too one-dimensional to work; the emphasis is placed on tourism and foreign investment because the decision-makers live in Nassau and tend not to be familiar with all the possibilities available to each island. But the devolution of central power to local state governments would enable Bahamian states to create work for lawyers, doctors, educators and bureaucrats, thus attracting high-level white-collar workers as well as construction workers and servants. Different islands could also create specific industries and businesses, generating local cadres of CEOs, and taking the responsibility for creating jobs out of Nassau politicians’ hands.

In the second place, vital services such as utilities, healthcare and (to some degree) education would follow population moves. State governments would ultimately have more control over their own destinies than presently exists. Cat Island and Long Island farmers could negotiate their own exports, much as Spanish Wells fishermen and Abaconian citrus farmers already do, without having to be stymied by the current practice of packing houses and the Produce Exchange. Court cases and punishment, at least for certain crimes, could all occur locally, thus leaving the Nassau judicial system for its own crimes; Fox Hill Prison might become the federal penitentiary in such a scenario, and relatively minor crimes could be handled in the communities in which they occur. Local communities could build their own hospitals, thus extending upper-level healthcare beyond Nassau and Freeport. The possibilities abound.

And so I propose that we think about working towards federation, and do it in the way that Canada, Australia and the USA did it before us: in stages, with the more populous territories leading the less populated ones. We already have administrative districts, and Freeport has a measure of autonomy that even Nassau does not share. Many of the northern islands could benefit immediately from being given similar autonomy, and certain central and southern ones might surprise us with their development if accorded similar freedoms. A few islands might have to be territories administered by neighbouring districts until they acquire sufficient population and infrastructure to govern themselves, but I believe that in the long run such a move could only benefit them, and the country as a whole.

But then I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong before.