Nassau, Bahamas — In the world there are many who have decided to fight the winds of Change. Amongst them there are tyrants like Kim Jong-il, Robert Mugabe and Hubert Ingraham. And like North Korea the Bahamas’ Kim Jong-il is adamant on making sure when he is kicked out of office – in 20 months from now – there remains a regime against democracy. His sole wish is for there to remain in place persons who will begin to question the freedoms we once enjoyed.
Hampered by the fact the world has changed and no longer media and its wide range of technical outlets can be stopped due to the advancement of freethinkers, the MUGABE led administration has now decided to STOP, CANCEL and REVIEW the FREEDOM OF THE AIRWAYS. Here’s what we know.
Readers would remember it was Hubert Ingraham and no one else who opened the airways to the Bahamian people. It was him who delivered this fresh voice of OPENNESS and TRANSPARENCY to this country. He licensed scores of radio stations and introduced Cable Bahamas, which subsequently brought modern high-speed internet service to thousands of residents. But what has happened now? Well, TODAY, the Ingraham government has decided to close-off access online at all government operations, and BP has learned residential accesses to certain websites will also be done. THIS IS AMAZING!
What could they [INGRAHAM’s Cabinet] possibly be thinking here? Have we Bahamas Press and others become such an eye-opener to the conscience of the Bahamians people that Ingraham has had enough of his own talk of “OPENING THE AIRWAVES”? His own words of “TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY” now have bitten him in the butt. Could it be his growing attacks on blog sites like BP have become so dangerous he has now decided to shutdown the Internet completely? Or could it be that competing websites are putting a ‘hurtin’ on the morning ‘toilet papers’? We don’t know.
Former Minister for the Public Service, Fred Mitchell, has rejected the Ingraham government’s plan to block internet access in government offices calling it a “foolish decision”.
Mitchell said, “The Minister argues that this makes the government more efficient but there is no empirical evidence to suggest that it does. The government has it backwards.
“The experts who came to me when I was Minister for the Public Service from the Inter American Development Bank on public sector reform told me that the problem with the government’s system was not abuse of the system, but the fact that the platform that they were using did not have sufficient capacity to meet the demands made by government workers and the public for access to the government’s system. ”
Once again Hubert Ingraham has decided to stifle FREE SPEECH IN THE COUNTRY! Mugabe and no else is hell-bent on stopping freedoms of the air. Here again he wishes to STOP, BLOCK, CANCEL and REVIEW the progress of Bahamians and now today like NORTH KOREA’S KIM JONG-IL he has decided to censure the Internet.
Could you imagine waking up heading to work all to find when you sit at your computer The Bahama Journal, GEMS, ZNS, THE Tribune, The Guardian, The Abaconian, Bahamas Press, Bahamasissues and Myplp.com are all blocked and only www.freenationalmovement.org can be accessed online! Boy, Bahamians are suckers for punishment.
Does that sound like a “Government in the Sunshine” to you? Sounds more like “Government where the sun don’t shine” to us!
We NEED CHANGE!
BP Thanks for the continued good work, but please in future try to leave out those ineffective free riders in the background. We will remain in the third country status because of these sensorships on our people.
I assume it was to cut down on wasted time in the government offices. I have seen lots of govt workers online during the day on Facebook. A filter would be the smartest thing to do as it is necessary for them to have internet for many uses.
IT FOLLOWS THAT THEY SHOULD GET RID OF THE COMPUTERS, AS WELL; BUT WOULD THEY DO THAT? ABSOLUTELY NOT. IT IS A STUPID DECISION AND THE HON. FRED MITCHEL IS RIGHT ON; AND BY THE WAY THE WEB FILTER SYSTEM IS A NATURAL, ESSENTIAL PART OF THE GOVERNMENT SYSTEM; I’LL BE SURPRISED IF IT IS NOT ALREADY A PART OF THAT SYSTEM.
the government has a web filter already. They had it for years.
That’s good for those civial servant who voted FNM,this is what they asked for.
Mr. Mitchell, is off base. In the private business sector this is a normal occurance. The fact here Government had two options. The first investing in Web Filtering software that would have filtered out, by policy all sites not associated with employee job function. This option however would have been to expensive in todays economic environment. So option two was used eliminate web traffic all together. I am and you are quite aware many Government employees do not need any more motivation to not perform there jobs, and the Internet just like it has on kids does affect productivity in a negative sense. Mr. Mitchell I believe used the wrong context from the Inter Development Bank so as to sensationalize his comments. The fact that downloads of any sort shrinks band width within an already infrastructure deprived government network. Stopping unwarrented internet traffic was the right and economically sound decision to make. I would however suggest that in better economic times it would be in the best Interest of Government to invest in a Webfilter Software. In todays market a filter that would cover the public sector would run into about $25 dollers per a user on the low end. You do the math. (Government workers * $25)
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