Viraj Perpall, officers and members of the Progressive Young Liberals:
I am pleased to be here for this structured dialogue with the Young Liberals.  In speaking to you this afternoon, I want to enlist you in the army of change and get you to sign off on my change agenda for the PLP.

For much of my life, consumed from age of 16 by politics, many have considered me an iconoclast.  It is a label that I wear happily in these days and times.  One regret I have is that I did not push even harder for change when our hands were on the levers of power. The past is prologue.  We have no time for regrets now, and you should accept these as the marching orders for the battle to come.

You know the expression "night comes when no man can work".  I was reading a commentary on that verse from the gospel of St. John and it said the following as to its meaning: "We must be busy and not waste day-time; it will be time to rest when our day is done, for it is but a day… What good we have an opportunity to do, we should do quickly. And he that will never do a good work till there is nothing to be objected against will leave many a good work for ever undone."

My theme then today is we cannot afford to wait a moment longer because night comes when no man can work.

A question that I am asked by Young Liberals all the time is whether or not there is room in the PLP for the young. Will any of you get a nomination from the party in the next election?  What role can you play in the PLP?  Will the older people allow you to help and contribute?

Viraj will tell you that I have said to him over and again that I find that a very strange question, because when I left high school at 16, it was politics that I wanted to do.  When I graduated from university, one of my first acts was to enroll in membership of the PLP and become a branch chair, later an NGC member and then a Senator, a Member of Parliament, a minister.  There are only three jobs that in the political directorate that I have not held that of Governor General, Prime Minister, Leader of the Opposition. I never once thought about the question of whether there was a role for me. I knew there was a role and I was determined to make one if there weren’t one.

In retrospect, all of that personal history may read like a neat tabulation but in between the story that I told and getting to those points, was not a neat story at all. But if you want any success, the simple truth is there is no easy path.

The answer then to the question of what is there for you in the PLP is this: it depends on what you want to do.  If you want a nomination then do what is necessary to get one.  If you want to help, then push your way through the front door.  The answer is simple, direct but not deceptive. If the door does not give, then you must be prepared to take the door down.

The theme is night comes when no man can work.  The commentary tells us that we must act quickly if we are to be ready for Election Day.  There is no use miring ourselves in useless would haves, should haves and could haves at this point.  We must press ahead.  I invite you to join me and all our colleagues in this endeavour.  My view is that this year change is the agenda.  We must all be prepared to change and not talk the language of change. I expect you to be change agents.  I do not need the Young Liberals to impress me with how they know the history of the party or who they know in the party or what they have, what impresses me is work and moving forward.

Part of that is simply framing the debate and letting your voices be heard, not in carefully worded and scripted orthodoxies of the old religion but your ideas and challenges for the future.  Remember, if you want to have freedom of speech, then you have to speak freely.

To this end, you are therefore challenged to articulate your vision for The Bahamas and move assiduously to carry it out.

Some of you talk with glowing admiration abut Sir Lynden Pindling who became a Member of Parliament at 26 years of age and Leader of the Parliamentary party of the PLP at that same age.  Eleven years later, there were no rivals and 42 years ago this Saturday coming, he became the nation’s first black Premier and later Prime Minister, taking the country into independence.

Do you think he wondered about whether or not there was a place for him at the table?  By 1960, he had gathered his contemporaries behind him in an organization called the National Committee for Positive Action and took the power from those who then led the PLP.  It is not an easy business.  It is to a neat business but those who want power have to fight for it.

Again Viraj will tell you that I have commended this quote to him and others over and again from Frederick Douglass, the great African American abolitionist and diplomat: Power concedes nothing without a demand.  In other words, no one is going to voluntarily give up power.  If you want power, you must seize it.

The party’s convention is coming up.  The changes in the party’s agenda and focus can begin there, but it must first start in the branches.  You know where branches are.  You know who the branch officers are.  Have you joined a branch?  Have you become an officer in a branch?  Will you become a delegate at the next convention?  What will your agenda be at that convention?

Many argue that the deck is stacked against you because there are some 1,000 Stalwart Councilors who have the right to vote at the convention and in the council as opposed to some 500 people who are regular delegates and officers with the right to vote at convention.  That should not stop you.

The math is quite simple.  The late Cecil Wallace Whitfield used to repeat all the time: you need 50 per cent plus one to win.

So you can have your candidates of choice for all offices.  You can have your issues that need to be adopted; the changes to the constitution that need to be made.  The only question is whether you have the discipline to go after it, form the alliances, and work the voters in order to win.

If you win the 1500 delegates, then it prepares you for the bigger fight in the general election.  Are you prepared to go and meet every stalwart councilor, door to door, phone by phone, person by person and people to people and convince them of the agenda for change?

I have already started.  Do you want to join me? Are you prepared to make the sacrifices?

If we get back to power, there is no question in my mind that this country will need full time members of parliament with the necessary support for their offices and public financing of political parties and campaigns.  Right now I am seeking to so order my affairs that this will be my singular pursuit until election day. I have no doubt that the sacrifice will be difficult but I am prepared to make it.  I see no other way.

Here is the list that I provided for the PLP oriented pages on Facebook to challenge young PLPs to get cracking:

The old themes are now replaced by what I call social justice and economic empowerment.

The pursuit of social justice will make sure that there continues to be social mobility in our country.  The success stories of those who can move from poor to well off within one generation must continue. We must eliminate poverty in our country.

I would like to set the goal for The Bahamas to be a developed country by the year 2020.  This will mean clear markers:
An increase in national income or GDP per capita,
A more refined literacy,
A lower birth rate and a lower death rate;
A national health insurance programme;
Unemployment benefits;
Better access to capital through small business loans, micro loans,
Improved infrastructure by land, sea and by air,
An improved tourism product,
National food security through an investment in agriculture and fisheries,
The rebuilding of our capital city and
Increased environmental protection.

One major and immediate goal must be to make the price of land and housing affordable for young Bahamians.

Are you willing to adopt those are your goals?

In seeking to get my message out, I have used the internet.  This is a tool that I have used to great effect since 1998 when the Nassau Guardian’s then editor Oswald Brown, an FNM ideologue, decided that nothing I said was worthy of being published. We now see who has the last laugh.

Yet, I believe that even with the podcasts that I do twice per month, the postings on the PLP website, the postings to bahamsucnensored.com or myplp.com, it is still not yet to the point where we can rival the influence of The Tribune, Guardian, The Punch , the Bahama Journal and the radio and television stations.

At first I thought maybe encouraging a boycott of the mainstream media by PLPs was necessary but I have rethought my position, with a more limited objective to simply get PLPs to read what is available about their own party from our own pro PLP websites.  That has proved to be difficult because today in order for the PLP to reach its own supporters to tell them and interpret what is happening in their own party and its institutions, you have to use the mainstream press.

Are you willing since many of you boast of being internet savvy to improve the PLPs data base, engage in marketing exercises to bump up the readership of pro PLP websites, and to improve their content so that they become truly news worthy?

When I made the appeal for young people to join the PLP, I realized that our own party did not have the tools to make that possible online.  That there is a significant need to upgrade our information technology and services but most of all our attitudes in the party toward information dissemination. We are too deliberative.  Too ponderous and by the time many of us react, time has passed us by.

You are then being challenged and enlisted in the fight of your life.  In Hubert Ingraham, we have a wily and devious opponent but he can be defeated.  He was defeated before.  He can be defeated again.

Since he came back to office his government has broken the conventions of the constitution with regard to consultation and the extent to which the Leader of the Opposition's views are to be taken into account in national decision  making.

There is a concerted campaign by the FNM government to smear and sully the name of every PLP, to destroy the party’s history and reputation, even though Mr. Ingraham came from its belly and bowels.  It is called the sin of ingratitude.

Even as we sit here, he has announced the appointment of retired public servant to be the Secretary to the Cabinet which in and of itself is not an issue but the question is whether someone who signed the nomination papers of the political opponent, the FNM opponent of Melanie Griffin in the 2007 election should now be called upon to be Secretary to the Cabinet. Can the country have confidence that she will give dispassionate and apolitical service to the country?  Mr. Ingraham does not care.

Last night at a reception for all Parliamentarians, the Leader of our party warned us of the war which we will face this year.  There is going to be a partisan attempt to destroy the PLP at every turn, using all of the agencies of the state against us.  I believe that this may even include the Royal Bahamas Police Force. You should be on heightened alert about this.  You should not underestimate the difficulties.  But I firmly believe and accept what Michael Manley of Jamaica told me in 1981 in the face of overwhelming defeat by Edward Seaga and the JLP: We routed them before we can rout them again.

I ask you then to sign on to this agenda for change.  There is no other way but straight ahead.  Let there be no fear.  We must use all legitimate means to defeat Mr. Ingraham and the FNM.  That is all I have to say because night comes when no man can work.