CHANGING THE COVID RULES IN THE END GAME

Last year this time, the country was in the middle of its second full lockdown at the behest of the Prime Minister who named himself “ the Competent Authority”. This is the name given to the person at whose behest the constitution once suspended, allows  the civil rights of citizens to be taken away. With it came also the power to create offences like: you must have an identity document in order to walk the streets, that you had to confine yourself to indoors, that you had to wear a mask, that you had to go home by a certain hour. For one year he has been using and abusing that power. In several cases making scores of young and older people criminal because they did not have a mask on or for selling coconuts on the side of the streets,  The Magistrates simply conformed to this nonsense. One of them sentenced a woman to jail for six months for faking a covid test.

Last year this time, we were nowhere near the number of cases we now have in the hospitals or in the country. We must have more than ten times the number of cases of covid and the hospitalizations are on the rise. Yet  the country is not to be locked down this time.  In fact, just the opposite is going to happen, the country is going to open up. He keeps saying that he is following the science. Really?

We have no issue with opening up the country.  This is long overdue. From what we can see, the present policy simply proves what we had been saying all along, it made no sense to shut this economy down for one year because in health terms it has made no difference at all. So all of us including the national treasury are broke, borrowed into oblivion because of the stupidity of that policy, pursued without end for one year and some days.

We don’t think that the  Minnis administration gets it though.  They won’t admit their folly.  The only thing that is guiding the present policy is the fact that a general election is coming sooner rather than later.  He wanted to hold the election just after Lent but the tide had turned so badly against him that his minders told him, never mind, you had better not mess with that .  So the current thinking is hold on to the bitter end: 13 months and 90 days before dissolution.

Maybe those who think so are right and maybe the PLP has been fooled and maybe they should stop spending but you know something tells us that this man Minnis is not spending a quarter of million dollars a month in television ads for nothing.  He cannot keep up that level of spending no matter how rich his benefactors for 13 months. He wants short sharp shock. That only suggests that he will go to budget, borrowing the last penny, spend and be damned. If he wins fine. If he loses, then it’s the PLP’s problem and he will simply blame the PLP as inevitably the country falls further into the abyss that he left.