Bahamians must benefit more from our resources

Dear Editor,

Blessed, beautiful and unique are the islands and people of the Commonwealth of The Bahamas. God made it so!

Why are we (it seems) giving it away on a silver platter to outside entities in the name of investment and development?

Can’t Bahamians have the opportunity to be major investors? The Bahamian from Bain Town to Yamacraw?

It appears as though we bake a cake as the host, and we give away most of it to our guests.

We must guard our inheritance so that Bahamians can receive the lion’s share of the investments, not pittance.

No Bahamians should be scrapping from hand to mouth for the amount of resources that God has blessed us with. How is it that it seems we only have VAT and other bills?

In the United Arab Emirates – Dubai, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, oil rich countries, I understand that the local citizenry get to enjoy the wealth by sharing in the oil.

What has happened to The Bahamas, a very wealthy country?

How is it that we have to get such a low percentage on any development? Sometimes the investors come with little or no money; they only come with a good idea.

They raise the capital right here in The Bahamas through shares, stocks and bonds.

God has given us so much to make our people wealthy and to live a comfortable life. We have salt, productive land, sand (the world has a shortage of sand as I understand it, yet we have the sand here).

We have fresh water.

We have abundant sunlight (if a cold country like Sweden can harness the limited sunlight that they have for energy, what about us who have sunlight all year round)?

We have oil, aragonite, lithium, gold, sea resources (marlin, turtle, crawfish, grouper, shark).

We have deep waters but most of all we have special people.

We have to change the formula where we have so much and benefit so little. We must stop giving away our land. God will call us to account for this. From this point moving forward no Bahamian should be left behind.

God bless the Commonwealth of The Bahamas and those who come to reside peacefully in our country.

— Franklyn Bethel 

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