FNM TRIES AFTER KEITH BELL WITH A DULL KNIFE
Keith Bell, Minister for Immigration
For two weeks now the Free National Movement has been relentless in its pursuit of Keith Bell, the Minister of Labour and Immigration. Mr. Bell’s offence of course is that he embarrassed the former Prime Minister Hubert Minnis and his FNM colleagues by exposing their alleged malfeasance in the expenditure at the embassy in Brussels. The story of the 19,000 dollar rug at the embassy.
He has been a relentless critic of the mismanagement of the FNM and so he has become a target. The usual refuge of these scoundrels is to start preaching corruption. So it was no surprise that when a decision was taken by the minister to parole out some non-nationals from the work site at the British Colonial in Nassau, they pounced on that because the folk inside the immigration department were saying they disagreed with the Minister’s decision.
The former Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition tabled a number of questions for which they demanded answers in the Parliament. Mr. Bell answered them in the public domain. He decided that he would not give the FNM any cover by using the cowardly route of innuendo and slander in the House of Assembly where their words would be protected.
The Prime Minister decided to stick with Mr. Bell. But the former Prime Minister threatened Mr. Bell in the House saying that if the Prime Minister did not fire him or if he did not resign by last Thursday 27 July 2023 that he ( Dr. Minnis) would “ bury Mr. Bell”.
These are tough words. The Chairman of the PLP Fred Mitchell told the country that Hubert Minnis did not have the ethical grounding to demand a resignation from anyone, after his history of perfidy in public office.
The PLP party has taken a political hit over this. But we have seen this playbook before. Many PLPs were calling on the Prime Minister to fire Mr. Bell but it just seemed a tad bit unfair in the circumstances where the substratum of the whole event was based on a lie that someone should have to resign.
This was a dull knife but quite a hatchet job.
Number of hits for the week ending Saturday 29 July 2023 up to midnight: 341,684;
Number of hits for the month of July up to Saturday 29 July 2023 up to midnight: 1,659,332;
Number of hits for the year 2023 up to Saturday 29 July 2023 up to midnight: 12,876,783;