HAVING YOUR CAKE AND EATING IT TOO
Leader of the Opposition Michael Pintard with former Prime Minister Hubert Minnis
Dame Billie Miller, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Barbados, used to warn us that you cannot approbate and reprobate at the same time. In other words you cannot have your cake and eat it too. Yet that is precisely what Michael Pintard and his colleagues in the Free National Movement are trying to do and tried to do when they spoke in the House of Assembly on Wednesday 19 March 2025.
They were speaking on a simple amendment that will allow the sub officer class in the Royal Bahamas Defence Force to extend their time in the force to the age of sixty when they reach the now mandatory age of retirement so long as they are healthy.
Here was the FNM’s argument throughout: they support the amendment but they think that the government is hiring too many old people.
They stupidly ignore the facts of the national demographics. Those facts tell us that we have an aging population. They tell us that young people will become a smaller percentage of the population as the population ages and unless there is a dramatic turnaround in the birth rate of the country, that is now below replacement level.
Any sensible political party should be looking at these stats and start developing policies that will meet those facts like extending the work life of the men and women, taking care of the national pension system and improving health and hospice care.
Instead the FNM has been steadily beating the drum of attacking older people in the work force. This is fool hardy. Both Hubert Minnis, the former Prime Minister and the now Leader of the Opposition fell into this trap.
They should be encouraged to continue in this foolish policy decision.
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