Dear Editor,
The sun beat hard against the glass of the House of Assembly, but the real storm was outside with. Dr. Hubert Minnis, the former Prime Minister, stood some where at a microphone, his voice dripping with sudden, passionate urgency. He lobbied the current Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) administration, demanding that Prime Minister Philip Davis give the nurses a salary raise immediately.
In the back row of the House gallery, Jerry Roker and some FNM sat quietly, watching the spectacle all with tight smiles. They all scribbled a single phrase in their notepads: The former King is naked, and he’s pretending he wearing a tuxedo to the beach.
To anyone who had survived the grim, locked-down days of 2020 and 2021, the irony wasn’t just thick; it was suffocating. Dr. Minnis demanding a swift, compassionate salary increase for healthcare workers from outside of the great House Gallery that he once had total control of: He was like a man sitting at the very bottom of the sunken Titanic, calling up to the surface to complain that his socks were a little damp.
The Bahamian electorate minds drifted back to the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when Dr. Minnis didn’t just hold the title of Prime Minister—he was the Competent Authority. In those dark months, that title meant absolute, sweeping power. With a single stroke of his pen, justified by the global emergency and the unimaginable sacrifices of frontline workers, he could have automatically adjusted the nurses’ compensation. If anyone in the Commonwealth of The Bahamas truly deserved an immediate increase, it was the nurses who wore garbage bags when PPE ran low and held the hands of the dying.
Instead, the Competent Authority had shamed and shunned them. When the exhausted doctors and nurses finally hit their breaking point and walked off the job in protest, demanding hazardous pay and basic administrative respect, they weren’t met with open checkbooks. They were met with cold bureaucracy and locked doors. Back then, you couldn’t find a trace of political goodwill for the nurses anywhere in town.
Now, the political seasons had changed. Minnis was no longer the King with the absolute scepter; he was an outcast former MP REJECTED, looking at a PLP government trying to navigate the fiscal hangover of those exact pandemic years.
I believe with his own a little personal Westminster-style parliamentsdespatch box in his living room, Dr. Minnis wrapped up his parliamentary speech, slamming his hand on the desk for emphasis, demanding justice for the healthcare heroes.
Jerry Roker and the entire House Gallery closed their notepads, stood up, and quietly exited the gallery. The revision of history was a fascinating sport, but out in the real world, the nurses still remembered who held the power when the town was locked down—and exactly who had left them out in the cold.
I like Dr. Minnis, this is just the facts.
GCF
