In seeking to portray the Minnis administration as serious about addressing the hot button issue of whether the Bahamian people are benefitting fairly from our natural resources, Leader of Government Business in the House of Assembly Renward Wells brazenly declared that the executive gave Centreville MP Reece Chipman “the opportunity to stand in this place and bring that resolution”.
The resolution Wells was referring to is the one introduced by Chipman calling for the appointment of a select committee to investigate matters connected to natural resources.
There is much we can say about Wells’ comment and his misguided view that it is the executive that has authority over the Parliament and grants such authority to all members to act in Parliament, but we wish to focus on whether the select committee on natural resources can be trusted to conduct an objective examination of this issue given that a government member is its chairman and Free National Movement MPs make up the committee’s majority membership.
After Chipman pushed this issue for more than a year and introduced a petition signed by a group of concerned Bahamians, the committee was finally appointed in July “to investigate all matters relative to the natural resources of the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, above, on or below the terrain and or sea; to identify the sources of the natural resources that contribute to the Sovereign Wealth Fund as well as entities (historical and current) engaged in extractions; identify areas of disbursements; recommend to Parliament mechanisms to enhance accountability and transparency in awarding contracts for exploration and extraction and receipt of disbursements; and to consider and suggest the best ways to ensure that the birthright of every Bahamian is legally protected…”
Golden Gates MP Michael Foulkes, parliamentary secretary in the Ministry of Social Services, is the committee’s chairman.
Other FNM members are Marathon MP and Environment Minister Romauld Ferreira; Fox Hill MP Shonel Ferguson, chairman of the Clifton Heritage Authority, and St. Barnabas MP Shanendon Cartwright, executive chairman of the Bahamas Public Parks and Public Beaches Authority.
They are in the majority.
Chipman, an independent, is also a member of the committee along with Progressive Liberal Party members Picewell Forbes, the MP for Mangrove Cay and South Andros, and Vaughn Miller, the Golden Isles MP, who was an independent when he was appointed to the committee.
In a guide on select committees in the Westminster system, the House of Commons Information Office notes that a select committee is a cross-party group of MPs or Lords given a specific remit to investigate and report back to the House that set it up.
It notes, “Select committees gather evidence from ministers and officials, the public and organizations outside Parliament. Their reports are published and the government must respond to their findings. Select committees are one of the key ways in which Parliament makes sure the government has to explain or justify what it is doing or how it is spending taxpayers’ money.”
We admit our surprise when we learned that the select committee on natural resources has as its chairman a parliamentary secretary.
There is a parliamentary tradition that the member who moves for a select committee becomes its chairman, but House rule 22(1) permits a committee to elect a chairman from among its members, and that is what this committee did, Foulkes noted.
Asked why Chipman was not chosen as chairman, Foulkes said, “The committee determined to have an election for the chairman pursuant to the rules. The rules provide for the committee when it first meets to have an election if they so decide and to elect a chairman and that is what the committee did.”
Birthright
Chipman believes that public confidence in the committee will be diminished by the fact that it is government controlled.
“The first thing is you do have the majority government members and you do have the minister responsible for this sitting there and they are the majority, so it’s a double whammy. You have Romauld and you’ve got the majority, so we might as well just leave it with the government,” he said.
Chipman said he did not expect that the committee would have as its majority FNM MPs.
He believes this defeats the purpose of an objective investigation into matters connected to natural resources.
He noted that because most of the members are FNMs, they will likely ultimately have the final say in the direction the committee takes, who it calls to testify, if anyone, and what it pursues.
“I think we demand a little bit more independence, neutrality when you get select committees of this type,” he told National Review after we contacted him to discuss the committee’s work.
“I don’t know how productive they will be in terms of reporting to the people. I don’t even know how productive they will be in terms of going out and getting what they need to satisfy the thirst of the Bahamian people into what is actually happening with the natural resources.
“We might as well had left it with the government and if it the PLP controlled it, you might as well had left it with the PAC (Public Accounts Committee).
“I think he (the speaker) could have made a better decision on a select committee of that nature because the people were screaming and shouting for an answer, but they don’t want it coming from the government or the opposition.”
House Speaker Halson Moultrie noted the rules provide for select committees to reflect the composition of the House. The FNM has 32 MPs (not including the speaker); the PLP has five and Chipman is the only independent member.
“So I determined that the best arrangement would have been a four-three arrangement, but it could have really been more lopsided than that because of the composition of the House,” Moultrie said.
“The difficulty there, I think that what happened was that Reece Chipman, who brought the matter to Parliament, was named as the chairman. I appointed him as chairman. Apparently, he went into the first meeting and agreed for the committee to elect its own chairman.
“And as a result of the government having four members, I think Vaughn Miller, the member for Golden Isles wasn’t present at that meeting, and so Michael Foulkes was voted in as the chairman of the committee. Now once you give up the chairman[ship] of the committee, that could have an adverse effect on the deliberations of the committee.”
Moultrie said the committee can still function effectively with a government member as chairman, but he acknowledged, “It will be much more difficult now, I believe, because the chairman can actually determine the agenda and even the frequency of the meetings and so on”.
For his part, Foulkes insists the committee — whose life was extended from October 1, 2020 to April 1, 2021 — is operating independently and is serious about its work.
“I can tell you, speaking for myself and the best that I can determine, all of the members treat this as a solemn duty to determine the facts as to all of the natural resources of this country because they are indeed a patrimony of the people,” he told us.
“They are an inheritance of the people and they are indeed, as Centreville said, the birthright of the people. That is our view.
“This is an investigatory committee and we intend to get the facts on all of the natural resources, all of them, wherever that leads us. We intend to get the information and present it to Parliament and indeed to the Bahamian people.”
Foulkes said the committee intends to present an interim report to Parliament before the Christmas break.
“I am aware that the Bahamian people are very interested in knowing all that they can possibly know about the natural resources of their country. I am very well aware that that’s a major issue for all Bahamians,” he said.
On Monday, the speaker ruled that a bill to repeal the Ocean Industries Incorporated (Aragonite Mining Encouragement) Act, which was tabled by Pineridge MP Frederick McAlpine last week, ought not to have been tabled because it is a money bill and under the constitution, only the Cabinet could consent to money bills.
McAlpine had tabled the bill which originated with the activist group Bahamian Evolution, which claims Bahamians are being cheated out of their fair share of returns from the country’s natural resources.
The House on Monday voted to send the bill to Foulkes’ committee instead. The expectation many in the public have is that it will die there.
But Foulkes insisted the committee will take a serious look at the act the bill is seeking to repeal.
“At the end of the day,” he said, “The bill is really a repeal. There isn’t too much in substance when you think of the bill in terms of new law that’s being created regarding a particular matter and what ought to happen. That’s not what that bill says.
“That bill is purely a repeal of another act, and so what we’re going to do is we’re going to look at that act because that’s really the basis of the repeal. We’re going to review that act in its entirety, every aspect about it; we will be looking at that thoroughly and substantively. We will be reporting to the Bahamian people on it.”
Trust
The committee’s report should provide a good indication of whether we can take what it has done seriously.
The difficulty this committee faces is that the Minnis administration has a very wide and extremely deep trust deficit and it is getting wider each week.
It will be hard for many Bahamians to trust that a committee with a majority government members, one of whom is the chairman, will give this issue of natural resources a thorough, objective and credible examination.
Even if its members are determined to do just that, the perception threatens to diminish their work.
Asked about the power of perception in matters such as these, the speaker said, “I think because there has been some uprising — I would classify it as a political initiative — that is happening that parallels this resources committee by persons who are not members of the House, that can have an impact on the perception of how effective the committee is because those persons appear to be willing to basically ride the wave of that committee.”
As chairman, Foulkes can not only call meetings and set the agenda of meetings, but also control the drafting of the report.
We hope that Chipman, as the only independent member on the committee, will indicate to the Bahamian people whether it was his experience that the committee was transparent and credible in its approach to the subject at hand.
We will await his observations.
The post Diminished confidence appeared first on The Nassau Guardian.
source https://thenassauguardian.com/diminished-confidence/
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