GUEST COMMENTARY: BY GODFREY ENEAS
NASSAU, Bahamas –For the past twenty years plus, I have had the opportunity to participate as a co-host with Ambassador Wendall Jones on the various radio and talk shows which are aired by Jones Communications. In conjunction with broadcasting, I am columnist with the Bahama Journal. It is this background which helped to sensitize me for the need of a book like “Road To Bahamaland.”
The Bahamas is essentially an oral society, so Bahamians are very attractive to radio talk shows because it facilitates oral expression. This oral tradition along with Social Media has created a new culture of communication in our Society.
In some ways, these influences have stunted our intellectual growth and development because we have not adopted the written tradition where we analyze and document the metamorphosis which has taken place and is happening in The Bahamas since Majority Rule in July,1967.
In 1973, Barbara Streisand recorded a song called “The Way We were”. Well, one of my favourite lines in the song was “ the smiles we shared together”. The 1973 Bahamas is very different from the 2022 Bahamas. In 1973, The Pindling Government was taking The Bahamas into Independence and nation building. The dream of Bahamaland was about to become a reality.
The question is what brought about the cosmetic change in the attitudinal outlook of our people? Here, again the Road To Bahamaland will provide some enlightenment on the causes for the change along with suggestions on the manner in which we can rectify the scenario.
The Bahamas is facing a generational crisis and it stems from the fact that, according to the Department of Statistics, the average Bahamian is 36 years old and he or she lives either in Nassau or Freeport because 83 % of our population of 415,000 are urban dwellers. To compound the situation, the majority of Bahamians today were born after Majority Rule and Independence.
When one harkens to that some will say you are talking “Old Story”, hence the generation divide and herein lies the challenge for us as people. How do you bridge the generational divide? Road To Bahamaland examines this issue. Please get it and read it.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Godfrey Eneas is a former president of the Bahamas Agriculture and Marine Sciences Institute (BAMSI), who wrote a book, “Agriculture in the Bahamas,” which highlights the continual decline of the country’s small ruminant industry for almost 40 years, as reported in The Tribune on March 30, 2017. In that article, The Tribune noted: “The industry has suffered because of limited interventions until the recent establishment of BAMSI, according to a press release from the institute
