By OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C., MARCH 26, 2020 – My daily reminder from Facebook of something I posted previously is becoming prophetically a catalyst for a more extended commentary. Today’s Facebook reminder is a photo I posted seven years ago on March 26, 2013, with the following caption: “Jeff Lloyd’s guest on his radio show this afternoon is His Grace Roman Catholic Archbishop Patrick Pinder (pictured below). Why not tune in now? It most certainly should be a very interesting interview.”
Like myself, Jeff Lloyd, who currently is doing an excellent job as Minister of Education, is a devout Roman Catholic. In fact, when I first became acquainted with him, he was Deacon Jeff Lloyd and I was in the congregation at the 10 a.m. Mass at Our Lady’s Roman Catholic Church through Deveaux Street in Nassau when he was the guest preacher. His sermon was so powerful that Satan abandoned whatever plans he had to tempt me into committing a sinful act – at least on that blessed Sunday.
My family relocated from Stanyard Creek, Andros to Nassau when I was 10 years old in 1952, and our homestead was a house through Paul Meeres Corner (now Fleming Street) that my Uncle Clarence Elliott, the eldest child of Benjamin and Mabel Elliott, had built before he relocated to New York in the 1940s. My mother, the late Violet Elliott Brown, was the oldest of three daughters among the seven children of Papa and Mama.
Papa used to be the catechist at St. Rita’s Roman Catholic Church in Stanyard Creek and was responsible for conducting Mass on those Sundays when the Priest, who alternated making his rounds of the various settlements in Andros once a month, was not present. Therefore, because Paul Meeres Corner was like an extension of Deveaux Street — between Market Street and Baillou Hill Road, while Deveaux Street extended between Market Street and East Street – it was only natural that Our Lady’s became our parish church. I actually served as an altar boy at Our Lady’s for several years before I developed some “bad habits” that led me astray andalmost to being confined for period in Reform School had it not been for the intervention of my no-nonsense grandparents.
I don’t recall listening to the radio show on which Deacon Lloyd interviewed Archbishop Pinder, but I am sure they had quite an intellectual discourse, given the fact that Archbishop Pinder is an erudite scholar, who graduated from Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology in Indiana with a degree in Philosophy and received an M.A degree in theology from Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium.
Of course, Jeff Lloyd is not only an electrifying speaker, but I am sure that Bahamians generally remember him for the visionary leadership he provided several years ago of the YEAST program, which redirected the lives of a number of youth-at-risk to a pathway leading towards being law-abiding productive citizens.
YEAST (Youth Empowerment and Skills Training ) Institute was founded in the late 1990s under the auspices of the Catholic Archdiocese of Nassau on the grounds of Our Lady’s with Lloyd as Executive Director.
During the first administration of former Prime Minister Perry Christie, the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) government implemented the National Youth Service program based in North Andros, as an expansion of YEAST, with Lloyd still as its executive director. There was no question that the program had a positive impact in rehabilitating some young men who had taken a wrong turn at a crucial crossroad in their lives when they were susceptible to being influenced by persons who were criminally inclined and had opted to likewise pursue careers as criminals.
For some inexplicable reason, after the Free National Movement (FNM) government — led by former Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham — returned to power after winning the 2007 general elections, the National Youth Service Program was cancelled a year later. At the time, Mr. Ingraham was reported to have said that the money being expended on the pogram could be better spent to help in the positive development of larger numbers of young people, according to an article published in the Nassau Guardian.
When the PLP again became the government 2012, the then Minister of Youth, Sports and Culture Dr. Daniel Johnson promised that a “more intensified version of the at-risk youth restorative program that was halted by the previous administration will be relaunched before September in conjunction with the Urban Renewal Programme,” according to an article in th Nassau Guardian on May 26, 2012.
“You will see something like that again,” Dr. Johnson was quoted as saying, adding: It will be updated, more intensified to get these young men to come to start rehabilitating and restoring [their] lives, and ultimately giving them a second chance. It is going to be based in several places this time around…We’re working that out now.”
There is no evidence suggesting that Dr. Johnson succeeded in fulfilling that promise, a fact which the Nassau Guardian obliquely referred to in a December 14, 2015 National Review article when it noted: “The Progressive Liberal Party came to office in 2012 promising to put in place ‘violence breakers’ in certain communities with greater crime risks. We have not heard about the operation of these individuals in those communities or whether they were ever put in place.”
The Guardian’s National Review article, which discussed THE YOUTH CRISIS in the county, was introduced with this attention-grabbing lead paragraph: “Just over 20 years after the Consultative Committee on Youth Development issued its report, The Bahamas is on the brink of “catastrophe” because it has failed to seriously address the state of its youth and critical social issues, retired Anglican Archbishop Drexel Gomez, who headed that committee, told National Review on Saturday.”
“We live in a new environment, and in this new environment, new measures are necessary if we are going to make a breakthrough,” Archbishop Gomez was quoted as saying. “What I fear now is we seem to be ambling along with no specific measures being taken to deal with this social problem. It’s more than a problem. It is something that approaches catastrophe if we’re not careful.”
The article also mentioned the National Youth Service program and its success under Jeff Lloyd.
“It was widely successful because we took failures in our society and turned around 87 percent of them; failures, those who had been rejected by society,” Lloyd told National Review. “Either they were in the reform school or correctional facilities or had been dismissed out of the regular school system and 87 percent of them, almost nine out of 10, were reformed by the YEAST program. And we’re talking about doing it on a shoe string budget.”
Mr. Lloyd added: “At the time, I remember making the comment that we were being penny wise and pound foolish. We were prepared to spend exorbitant sums of money strengthening the Royal Bahamas Police Force, which of course is needed and also providing additional facilities in Fox Hill Prison. Again, if we are going to be incarcerating people at the rate we are then it is easily costing us $20,000-plus to house a young person in Fox Hill Prison for a year. It would make a lot of sense for us to see if we can prevent them getting there in the first place, particularly young men who are already headed to a life of incarceration, crime, criminality and possibly even death.”
Obviously, given the current seemingly out-of-control involvement of young men – and, increasingly, more young women – in criminal activities, surely Jeff Lloyd, who is now a senior member of the governing FNM, should strongly recommend to his colleagues that they take a serious look at re-reinstituting some form of the National Youth Service Program in The Bahamas.
