Monday 7th May saw the return to parliament of the Progressive Liberal Party (as the government) led by the Rt. Hon. Perry Gladstone Christie, replacing Hubert Ingraham’s Free National Movement and signaling the end of a brutal five-year economic period which claimed the majority of assets and other financial resources of hundreds of unsuspecting and unprepared Bahamians.
Particularly for Grand Bahama was the significance of the election of Dr Michael Darville, a well know and well –loved medical practitioner and Mr. Gregory Moss a lawyer/businessman by profession. I say that their election was significant because it ends five years of lackluster representation by the Free National Movement’s team of eight parliamentarians (five MPs three of whom were cabinet ministers and one the deputy speaker of the house and three Senators) who literally stood by and watch as Grand Bahama Island slowly fell deeper and deeper into the abyss of economic depredation. Many thousands of just ordinary Bahamians lost their jobs, their careers, their middle-class status and the their homes while the FNM team of cabinet ministers kept silent as lambs and did nothing to change the course to our economic ruin.
Five years can be a very long time when you are waiting for urgent relief from financial hopelessness and certain ruin. So May 7th couldn’t come quickly enough as the urgency in the air reached its highest crescendo on Monday morning as the lines got longer and longer with anxious citizens waited patiently to cast their vote in support of the Progressive Liberal Party and against the Free National Movement which was seen as having polices which perpetrated most of the bad conditions we have been experiencing over the entire period the FNM has been in power.
They see the election of Darville and Moss as a giant step in the right direction of bringing relief and doing so in the shortest possible time.
