PETER TURNQUEST A USELESS BEAN COUNTER
(SOULESS AS A DEAD FISH)
The joys of Bahamian democracy: one day you are a bean counter for a three aircraft company flying domestic routes in The Bahamas, the next day you are the Finance Minister for a nation with a 2 billion dollar or so budget. Some people take to it like a fish to water, others are simply lost and get too grand and take on a personality like you’ve never seen. Peter Turnquest, the Minister of Finance of The Bahamas falls into that category, the latter one.
You cannot believe that this pompous silly, soulless individual who now is called the Minister of Finance of The Bahamas is actually the same fellow who was Peter Turnquest, the bean counter at Sky Bahamas.
He started off all wrong. He didn’t even know or understand the lessons of the most modest Bahamian housewife on the question of how to manage money. You borrow anything that you can to keep the children in school. You pay back as little as you can so the cash flow will keep going. You beg borrow and persuade your creditors to give you another week and the rent will be paid or the money for the insurance will come or the school fees will come.
Peter Turnquest decided when he became Minister of Finance that he would simply borrow the money to pay off all the bills of The Bahamas. The very notion is stupid. You cannot pay off all your bills. He and his party decided to borrow 700 million dollars in the first week in office. Since that time they have borrowed another 200 million making it almost a billion dollars in one year. Unprecedented.
They did this to fulfil a narrative, that the PLP was profligate, that the PLP was corrupt and that they the FNM would save the nation and bring the Nation’s finances back into order. We tell you this. If they have a hurricane this year, we are in big trouble because they have maxed out the credit card of the nation.
You would have thought that they had their fun after ten months in office but he was still at it last week when he delivered his budget debate intervention on Wednesday 7 March. The PLP did this. The PLP did that that. The PLP did the other thing. Yada! Yada! Yada! They could not say what the FNM was going to do; still digging in the garbage can looking for what they did not put down.
As God would have it, the Finance Minister and this Prime Minister Hubert Minnis were boasting that they had saved the nation from being blacklisted. On Friday 9th February, the news started circulating that the European Union had decided that they would put The Bahamas on a black list for not allowing the EU exposure to IBCs in our jurisdiction. There is always some trap or other. The PLP tried to tell them that these people have no friends. The EU, the OECD, and the US they all have their own agendas and they do as they wish and they keep changing the goalposts and they think of us all as savages. We all look alike to them, crooks from the Caribbean.
The PLP will say: we told you so.
Peter Turnquest had to issue a hurried, we did the best we could statement to the nation, but his behind is exposed for what it is. He is hopelessly into something about which he has no level of competence.
A bean counter whose only experience in finance is counting airline vouchers to see if they add up, does not a finance minister make. He is an embarrassment, He is jumped up little pipsqueak in a job in which he is too big for his britches. Shame on him.
Number of hits for the week ending Saturday 10th March, 2018 up to midnight: 202,566;
Number of hits for the month of March up to Saturday 10th March, 2018 at midnight: 261,981;
Number of hits for the year 2018 up to Saturday 10th March, 2018 up to midnight: 1,969,549.