ARE CHILDREN FAIR GAME IN POLITICS? IT DEPENDS

Brent Symonette, the Minister for Financial Services, Investments and Immigration, told the public in defence of the company Hot Mix getting a 20 million dollar contract to pave the runway at the Lynde Pindling International Airport that it was not his company but his children’s company. He is righteously indignant apparently that his children are being attacked. Not sure by whom. The problem is he put his children in the public domain and so they are fair game. The other point in response to that is that his children are not babes or toddlers or even minors, they are adults and fully capable of defending themselves. When Brave Davis as Leader of the PLP was attacked because the Minister of Works Desmond Bannister erroneously claimed that Mr. Davis had given his brother a contract through the Bahamas Electricity Corporation, Brent Symonette and his partisan friends made no such distinction. Similarly with Allyson Gibson, the former Attorney General, and claims that her children had an interest in shops at Bahamar when she was trying as Attorney General to settle a legal dispute with the company. It will be interesting to see how Mr. Symonette plays this out in the public domain with reports of one contract after the next going to Hot Mix, a company he says is not his but that of his children It is clear that the FNM supports the greedy and not the needy.