THE BAHAMAS PROFILE IN THE WORLD

The Bahamas enjoys a generally good reputation in the world, if you judge the number of “Ah Ha” comments that you find.  This is largely the anecdotal stories of people who meet Bahamians and recall how they enjoyed their time when they came to The Bahamas. One of these was Joe Biden, the now President of the United States, who found his first wife in Nassau at the British Colonial.  The other was the late Prime Minister of Japan Shinzo Abe who honeymooned in Nassau at what is now the Warick Hotel, then called Loews.  But then you have the European Union and certain of the left in the United States and Canada who think of us as pirates and bandits stealing their tax money.  The Prime Minister’s job today is to manage all of those competing images, to try and save a country that is wealthy but pretends to be poor, but has a GDP per capita which belies the story of poverty.  One thing is the IDB said in 2020 that 47.6 per cent of the population lived under the poverty line.  This does not portend a good political or economic result, unless the Governments are able to right this ship.  The image is important as we try to find the money to save ourselves from the ill effects of climate change.