The Sovereignty of the Grand Bahama Port Authority (GBPA)

 

A summary of the Hawksbill Creek Agreement (HCA) - The Bahamas

By Professor Gilbert Morris

Ca Newry - I wish people would read and notice the references on which designations and classifications are based and resist using their uninformed nonsense impressions as having validity.

The Royal Commission 1971 ruled that legalisation could not alter the Hawksbill Creek Agreement.  That means the Sovereign State was limited by the prerogative of the Licensees under the Hawksbill Creek Agreement.

In jurispudence what force can bind a sovereign in its sovereign power?  No contact can bind a sovereign as a sovereign.  It’s remedial foolishness to suggest otherwise.

In a recent Supreme Court case, it was found that the sovereign status of the Grand Bahama Port Authority means it could not be wound up under Bahamas company law.  Principals of the Port sought to have one of the main principals removed and have the GBPA wound up.  The court did not say that would be a breach of contract.  It said the GBPA’s special status is governed by the Hawksbill Creek Agreement which grants sovereign power to the Licensees whatever the government’s position may be.  To any clear eyed person that is not a mere contract and the court recognised as much!

To any one who know the six Privy Council cases and understand basic law…and have worked on or read the pleadings of Maurice O. Glinton KC…they know the HCA is not a contract and to make such a claim is nonsense.

A trust is law can be created without naming it.  It depends on the rights and obligations of the parties: the government is the Settlor, the GBPA are the trustees and the Licensees are the beneficiaries…the Hawksbill Creek Agreement is the trust Deed!  That was my explanation in the summary of the Hawksbill Creek Agreement for testimony before a court.  As such, these aren’t mere opinions.  This is what the law has confirmed.  If the terms are too complex then it’s the reader who must get education rather than bellowing neuroflatulence!

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Grand Bahamians Deserve More

Bahamian Ownership in The Bahamas

Bahamians Invest in The Bahamas

By The Hon. Dr. Hubert A. Minnis
Nassau, N.P., The Bahamian

Grand Bahamians deserve more than lower electricity bills. They deserve the opportunity to become shareholders too!

When the Nassau Cruise Port opened its investment opportunity to Bahamians, thousands participated, and investors have since received dividends.

Many Bahamians missed opportunities like that in the past because information wasn’t as accessible as it is today.

Now, with the Government’s acquisition of Grand Bahama Power Company, I believe ordinary Grand Bahamians should have the opportunity to purchase shares, not just a select few.

We know better.  Let’s do better!

If you have friends or family living in Grand Bahama, share this video with them.  Let them understand the opportunity being proposed and ask the Government how ordinary citizens can participate.

Don’t just be a customer.  Have the opportunity to be an owner!

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THE NATIONAL INVESTMENT FUND (NIF) OF THE BAHAMAS: DOES THE BAHAMAS GOVERNMENT'S EXPLANATION ADD UP?

Questions for The Bahamas Government on Spending The Bahamas National Investment Fund (NIF) Money

THE NIF: DOES THE GOVERNMENT'S EXPLANATION ADD UP?

By Lynden R. Nairn:
Nassau, N.P., The Bahamas

The Government wants us to believe that:

1. It established the NIF in 2023 but failed to make it operational.

2. In 2025, it authorised borrowing of up to $300 million to fund the NIF.

3. Because the NIF was not operational, the Ministry of Finance spent the money instead.

4. Despite knowing this, it proposed a further $700 million for the same Fund in May 2026.

Here is the question: If the NIF could not spend the first $300 million, why would the Government propose giving it another $700 million?

We are talking about experienced Cabinet Ministers with access to the country's top legal and financial advisers.  Surely, they knew the Fund was not operational when they proposed the first and most certainly the additional funding.

Why has it taken more than three years to get the Fund operational?  Who authorised the spending, and where is the full accounting?

The Government owes the Bahamian people an explanation. Saying the Ministry of Finance spent the money on infrastructure projects is not good enough.

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Questions on The National Investment Fund (NIF) of The Bahamas

- Halkitis on Wednesday: The NIF spent $310M
- Munroe on Thursday: The NIF don't yet exist

By Lynden R. Nairn

On June 25, 2025, Attorney General Ryan Pinder told the Senate:

“We look to have the fund constituted by the end of this month and funded in part from proceeds from the recent bond offering.”

Remember, Parliament had already passed the $300 million borrowing resolution on March 10, 2025 — some 107 days earlier.

Now fast-forward almost 15 months.

Yesterday, Minister of Finance Michael Halkitis explained:

“During the period before the Fund’s governance arrangements became fully operational, the Ministry of Finance acted on the basis that the Public Finance Management Act governed the administration and application of these public resources through the Ministry and the Treasury.”

He further acknowledged that the Government is still completing the Fund’s regulations, mandates, committee structure, financial reporting and audit processes.

So let us put the timeline together.

On June 25, 2025, the Attorney General said the NIF was expected to be constituted within five days.

Almost 15 months later, the Minister of Finance tells Parliament that essential governance arrangements are still being completed — after $310.9 million of NIF proceeds has already been spent.

Perhaps Attorney General Pinder was simply mistaken.

But if he was, when did the Government discover that the Fund would not be constituted as represented?

And, more importantly, why did the Government proceed to deploy hundreds of millions of dollars while the governance arrangements of the very Fund Parliament had authorized to receive the money were not fully operational?

Those questions deserve answers.

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Decolonise The African Mind

The True Size of Africa

NOW THAT THE #MAP IS DONE (AT LAST); LET’s DECOLONISE THE AFRICAN MIND!

By Professor Gilbert Morris

Nassau, N.P., The Bahamas

In the postcolonial world, we have the habit of acting so late - after so much damage has been done - that when the action comes, it feeling like a distraction.

The map and the vision occupy different orders of reality, one spatial and measurable, the other durational and willed, yet the two orders are not wholly severed from one another, since a diminished spatial self-image may weaken the very capacity for durational commitment that coordination demands.  Correcting the map removes one obstacle among many.  It does not construct the institutions, the shared curricula, or the negotiated sacrifices of sovereignty that a genuine continental future requires.

One understands: Africans have hardly been in charge of their countries. Colonial powers became imperial powers and the actual foreign policy of the G7 was in assisting each other in continuing to exploit former colonies…by invading them, or in the case of France, killing more than a dozen of their leaders who don’t comply; using BRETTONWoods institurions to cripple them and international media to demonise them…all whilst stealing their resources under puppet regimes installed against the wishes of the African peoples.

Today, we are in a slightly different place: the Sahel hero-zone which is leading the way to a decolonised mind operating away from western institutions, but responsive to citizens.

Yet, whilst Dangote is a commerical bright spot in Nigeria (and there are others), he faces treachery in attempts to maintain the slavish extraction-led status quo; Boko in Botswana and the Namibians are showing signs - even if they talk more than do for now - Ruto is failing utterly in Kenya; Senegal’s president is destroying friendships to maintain a colonised dynamic with France, as are Cote D’Ivoire, DRC, Tanzania, Chad, with Uganda offering to serve as handmaiden to genocide in Gaza!  Rwanda and Ethiopia seem willing to risk other African lives for an African success story - though we must love their diligence - Somalia, Libya and the Sudans seem cursed by dishonest African and decietful foreign hands.  Zambia, Gambia, Ghana - which seems to start and stop - Malawi, Madagascar, Eritrea seem in limbo, as Zimbabwe is trying to tell us a good story…even if with troubling signs.  South Africa is the biggest disappointment - as we thought it would be a role model for other African nations.  Instead it’s pursued the worst of Nigeria.  All the rest are doing nothing to speak of…either holding onto old systems or old leaders wasting Africa’s moment of youth!

This does not mean there aren’t bright stories in Africa.  But the time for such stories has passed: AFRICA NEEDS COORDINATED ACTION NOW…if it is to build the future expected for so long by its youth now supported by the largest number of skilled talented Africans returning to the continent.

Africa must get busy cultivating a new development model away from western neoliberal financialisation: Africa can’t just develop skyscrapers, cramped urban settings, based on financialisation and extraction.  These systems failed and are failing in the West.

By “financialization” I mean the historical process, traced by Giovanni Arrighi in The Long Twentieth Century (1994) and by David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), whereby capital accumulation shifts its center of gravity from the production of goods toward the trading of claims on future production, so that value comes to be measured increasingly in instruments detached from the material and communal life they nominally represent.  By “neoliberalism” I mean the doctrine, formalized in the WashingtonConsensus of the late 1980s, that prescribes market liberalization, privatization, and fiscal austerity as universal conditions of development, largely irrespective of local historical circumstance.  By “civilizational approach” I mean a developmental orientation grounded in the relational ontologies indigenous to African social thought, of which Ubuntu, glossed by John Mbiti in African Religions and Philosophy (1969) as the principle that personhood is constituted through community rather than prior to it, is the most widely cited instance.  We must not waste time celebrating maps: we must use that momentum to coordinate to achieve larger immediate goals.

Africa must coordinate to conceive another model of civilisation based upon a blend of ancient ways and systems augmented by modern sustainability and eGovernance…with the aim like Singapore of full participation and full inclusion.

Strategic coordination around a civilizational vision offers Africa a genuine ground for de-risking from financialized neoliberalism, supported by convergent evidence from philosophy, political economy, and cultural theory, and by the historical record of structural adjustment’s documented costs and of Botswana’s counterexample.  That vision remains incomplete as a program until it specifies the accountability mechanisms that would prevent its capture by the authoritarian temptation that authenticité already illustrates, and until it resolves, case by case, which indigenous structures are genuinely communal and which are colonial ossifications inherited under the name of custom.  That resolution cannot be accomplished in the abstract; it requires the disciplined, state-by-state forensic labor that any serious civilizational project must undertake before it can be trusted with the name.

Professor Gilbert Morris

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What is One Tax Bahamas?

What One Tax Bahamas is Not

By Senator the Honourable Latrae Rahming

Nassau, N.P., The Bahamas

I know there has been a lot of confusion around One Tax Bahamas, so let’s start with what it is not.

One Tax Bahamas is not a new tax.  It does not introduce higher tax rates, nor does it clear the path for new taxes.

It is a modernised digital platform designed to make it easier for Bahamians to manage their existing tax and fee obligations.

Instead of navigating different systems for VAT, business licences, real property tax and other services, individuals and businesses will progressively be able to access them through one platform using a Bahamas Identification Number.

For Bahamians, this means a simpler process, less duplication, clearer access to information and fewer unnecessary administrative hurdles.  It should be especially beneficial to small-business owners, who need government services to be easier to understand and use.

Registration begins on 1 September 2026, ahead of the phased introduction of services.  Clear guidance, public education, stakeholder consultation and practical assistance will remain central to the rollout so that no Bahamian is left behind on its usage.

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The AI 'Black Box' Problem

Fear Not Artificial Intelligence (AI) Bahamas!

By M. Maria Varence
Nassau, N.P., The Bahamas

This is a must needed conversation, but there is another side of that conversation that I pray is addressed.

What happens when we begin relying on systems whose decisions we cannot adequately explain?

This is the AI “black box” problem.

Many advanced AI systems, particularly those built using deep learning, can produce remarkably accurate outputs while making it extremely difficult to determine precisely how the system arrived at a particular conclusion.

Now imagine someone asks a very reasonable question when one of these decisions are made:

Why did the system make that decision about me?

The black box problem exists everywhere, but developing countries face an additional vulnerability.

We are unlikely to build most of the sophisticated AI systems that eventually operate within our economies.

The models may be developed elsewhere, trained primarily on foreign datasets, designed around different populations and regulatory environments and then incorporated into systems used locally.

That creates an important question for countries like The Bahamas:

Are we importing technology faster than we are developing the institutional capacity to govern it?

Consider something as simple as lending.

A foreign-developed AI system may identify correlations that work extremely well within a large North American or European dataset.  But Bahamian employment patterns, household structures, informal economic activity, geography and consumer behaviour do not necessarily mirror those markets.

If we cannot adequately interrogate how the decision was reached, identifying bias or inappropriate assumptions becomes significantly harder.

Much of the AI governance conversation understandably focuses on bias and discrimination.

But black box systems raise another issue: accountability.

If an AI-assisted decision causes harm, where does responsibility sit?

With the international technology provider?  The Bahamian institution that purchased the system?

Or the algorithm that nobody can fully explain?

We cannot regulate an algorithm in the same way that we hold a person or institution accountable.  Ultimately, responsibility has to remain somewhere within the human governance structure surrounding the technology.

That means explainability cannot simply be a desirable feature.

In certain high-impact decisions, it may need to become a governance requirement.

We should not wait until adoption is widespread.

The Bahamas does not need to fear AI.  In fact, I believe small states should be aggressively exploring how AI can help us overcome some of our structural limitations.

But enthusiasm for adoption should be matched by investment in governance.

Before AI becomes deeply embedded we should already be asking:

- What decisions should AI be permitted to make or materially influence?

- When must a human remain accountable for the final decision?

- What level of explanation should a citizen or customer be entitled to receive?

- What capacity do our regulators need to meaningfully challenge these systems?

These questions become even more important across the wider Caribbean, where individual states may not have the technical resources to independently scrutinize AI system entering their markets.

There may therefore be a strong argument for regional cooperation around AI governance.

Developing countries are often encouraged to ensure that we are not “left behind” by technological change.

But there are two ways to be left behind.

One is failing to adopt transformative technology.

The other is adopting technology without developing the institutions capable of governing it.

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