ADDRESS BY SENATOR FRED MITCHELL
ON WINDSOR PARK
ON THE REFERENDUM AND HUBERT INGRAHAM
25 FEBRUARY 2002

    Thank you Mr. Moderator.

     I think we ought my brothers and sisters to thank Senator Obie Wilchcombe for catching the government with its hands in the cookie jar in Grand Bahama, trying to fiddle the books and fool with the ballots. He did a good job and we should applaud him.
     My brothers and sisters, I am again honoured and privileged to be here this evening to say a few words to you as we work toward the defeating the Free National Movement’s attempt to diss our national constitution.  I hope that you are all armed with the will to vote no on Wednesday coming.  It is important to defeat Mr. Ingraham.  Please vote no, tell all your friends to vote no.  Let us send a message straight to the Wallace Whitfield Centre.  Your time is up.  It is time for you to go.  So long! Farewell! Adieu! Bon Voyage! Carry your …
     I have come again to speak frankly and soberly this evening about a matter of serious concern for our country.  That serious concern for all men and women of goodwill must be the state of mind of the Prime Minister.  It appears to be fragile, shaky and unstable. His personal behavior raises serious concerns about his fitness for office and his state of mind. It has in my view become an embarrassment for the country.  It is one thing to talk in playful banter and rally talk. It is quite another to be flagrantly out of line and disrespectful.
     Last week, when I spoke to you I laid out for you a psychological profile of a deeply wounded and disturbed man. I said at that time that it appeared in that profile that we were dealing with someone who as a child was deeply wounded by the things he may have been called on the playground as child.  It must have been no fun at all to have been called “water head”. I have been called many names in my lifetime. And I hear that they threaten to call more. But you know if I worry about what people say about me, I would not get out of bed in the morning.
     What do we all do, when we are faced with adversity. The great Nelson Mandela when speaking to U.S. President Clinton in the middle of Mr. Clinton’s crisis, told us what to do. And he ought to know. He said the quality of a man or a woman can be assessed not how you behave when you are riding high.  You can tell the quality of man or woman when they are at their lowest point.  And what you do he said is to realize that as long as there is life there is hope.  You raise yourself out of your bed, because whether or not you are on the scene the sun will still shine. You put one foot forward and then the next, dust yourself off and start all over again.  I am sure we all know that lesson.
     One thing that you do not do it try to save up grudges against those who may have injured you or harmed you or seek to do harm against you.  By all means you must defend yourself.  You must meet fire with fire but at the end of the day hatred and begrudgfulness only harm you.  You must rid yourself of all the internal poisons.
     And that is the advice we give to Hubert Ingraham tonight.  We see in public life a profile of very bitter man whom the Bahamian people did not realize in 1992 had deep psychological wounds from his childhood that have apparently not healed.  This is not my theory.  It is a theory espoused by many learned doctors in the society and an erstwhile political friend of his whom I have spoken with over the past week.  I was seeking to understand how it is that we appear to have a crazy man as our Prime Minister.  One day he can be charming and polite, the next day he is like maniac lashing out at all and sundry.
     On the day that his party won the bye-election in Mangrove Cay, he gathered his friends at his home to drink champagne and told his friends as he filled himself with bubbly that he had finally vanquished the last person who had done him harm in the PLP. Make no mistake this betrays the mind of a seriously vengeful person.  And of course we know that his list of enemies has increased since then, not decreased.
     Some people have described the way the actions I have as those of a manic depressive. Others suggest that it is exacerbated by drinking and that in fact we may be dealing with an undiagnosed alcoholic.  Those who are members of Alcoholics Anonymous will tell you that when you are an alcoholic, the very first thing you must do in order to recover is to stop drinking and tell yourself every day that you continue to be an alcoholic.  They say that with God’s grace each day that meets you and you don’t take a drink, your head becomes clearer.  But nothing can heal the fog of the mind that comes with being undiagnosed alcoholic, who wakes up in a semi-drunken stupor every day, and tries to make rational reasonable decisions. And what complicates matters is when you will not admit it.  You see you have no problem with anyone who says I like my liquor.  In that case, you know what you are dealing with. But when someone refuses to accept what they are, that’s when you have trouble.
     Ordinarily private and personal behavior does not come before the public. And I have always said in the past that the personal behavior of a public individual is none of the public’s business unless that behavior becomes a public matter.  So ordinarily the question of whether one drinks or not, whether one is suffering from grave psychological injuries is not a subject for public comment. If it does not make you dysfunctional, then it is none of the public’s business.
     The Harvard Professor Dennis F. Thompson wrote in his book Political Ethics and Public Office about this subject and I ask you to bear with me as I quote on the issue.  Mr. Thompson argues that a public man or woman must have a private life but their privacy is diminished, unlike the ordinary citizen because that public official is accountable to the public.
     He writes on the issue: “It implies that private lives should become public only to the extent necessary for certain limited purposes, specifically to ensure democratic accountability.”
     That is the theory.  Now let us look at the facts.  Within the last month, since we have joined issue with the Free National Movement, Hubert Ingraham, a man who said ten years ago that he would retire from public life after two terms, appears to be fighting to remain in public life. That means that he lied to the public about that fact. The question one must ask is why did he lie.  Further, one must ask the question, why does he need the power so badly that he was prepared and is prepared to lie to the public?
     Secondly, we have seen Mr. Ingraham insult a woman from a  public platform, the very gender he says that he is trying to uplift. We have seen him insult a man of God from a public platform, and of course we know that he does not go to church on a regular basis, and only joined one when it became politically expedient to do so in 1992. Lastly he attacked the PLP’s legal advisor in these matters, the Hon. Paul L. Adderley.  He has on several occasions insulted the leader of the PLP and his wife.
     Last week, from this platform, we tried to shame him into a sense of propriety.  But the shameless and disgraceful attacks continue. This suggests that the Prime Minister is some one who is without shame and has no social guidance or internal clock to tell him whether he is doing right or wrong.  The psychologists tells that this is clearly a man who was used to being slapped up side the head as a boy in order to listen to what his elders would say. He is like a school yard bully. And the psychologists tells us that the only way to deal with someone of that kind of background is to slap him up side the head.  It is the only language he understands.  Perhaps, Mr. Bradley Roberts our MP for Grants Town ought to have simply walked across the floor of the House of Assembly and given him two cowboy slaps and we would have had a calmer Prime Minister today.
     Now in this regard, I wish to apologize to the Roman Catholic Archbishop and my own Archbishop and the President of the Christian Council but I am not advocating violence.  In defence of my statement I wish to quote from Article 2266 of the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, the official doctrine of the beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church and I quote: “ Preserving the common good of society requires rendering the aggressor unable to inflict harm.”
     In attacking Paul Adderley last week, he said that Mr. Adderley should not be listened to because he is old tired and rejected.  Of course, he wants us to vote yes for the retirement age of Judges who are the same age as Mr. Adderley.  And he has also appointed Dame Ivy Dumont who is 72 years of age, the same age as Mr. Adderley. But logic does not count to some one who may be in a drunken haze. Drink impairs logic. And so the answer is not to drink.  A Prime Minister ought to be sober, and act advisedly.
     His attack on Perry Christie in Freeport was also instructive in that he said that he Mr. Ingraham unlike Perry Christie did not have a university education and was not well read, yet he said that he had become more powerful than Mr. Christie.  The psychologists tell us again that this betrays a man who has a chip on his shoulder about his education.  He feels that he did not get a fair chance, and he is holding a grudge against Mr. Christie, and is jealous of Mr. Christie. He will do anything to ruin Mr. Christie.  That makes him a cagey adversary, and one that must not be underestimated.  What it means is that you can never trust such a person, because he is always ready to pounce on you and stab you in the back.
     The fact that someone is psychologically vulnerable.  The fact that someone may be under a drunken haze and in fact an alcoholic, then leaves that person no matter how high an office which the attains in an extremely vulnerable position.  You cannot predict when he will lash out.  And any foul thing will come out of his mouth. Any foul deed.  Thus the attack on Mr. Adderley, one of this nation’s finest public servants, thus his condoning the ads that attack the family of Perry Christie and the Prime Minister refuses to apologize for that form of misbehavior.   Obviously this is a man without common courtesy, no respect, little decency and no broughtupcy.
     The PLP must learn an instructive lesson from that.  The first thing is that you cannot make a deal with a drunken man.  His mind does not operate that way. You can only make deals with sober and right thinking people.
     The PLP must also go on the attack even while reminding the country that where we ought to be is on the high ground, not down low in the gutter. And we must only do so if provoked. I think that we have been provoked enough.
 It is no secret that it is my wish for us to leave this park now and march on ZNS to demonstrate forcefully the cheating that is going on at that institution.
     But tonight that is not my role.  Today in Fox Hill six shots ran out around my headquarters.  The person around and the woman inside Mr. Altamese Isaacs ran for cover.  Shots continued to ring out and the principal of the Sandiland Primary School had to take cover as his staff shouted to close the door.  A man passed by with hand gun in the yard and fired shots.  One man is dead today, killed in cold blood in front of the Sandilands Primary School.  Fortunately, no children were at school today. But this is the second incident in a year of violence around a place where children are supposed to learn.  At one time, a man was beaten to death in the Sandilands Primary School within the school yard right in front of the children.
     The conventional wisdom in Fox Hill is that this is part of the continued social struggle that we are having with a dispossessed immigrant community, mixed in amongst us that we refuse to properly integrate into this society. The Prime Minister by the use of this deceit in which he now has engaged us is seeking to distract the country from real problems like crime, death and destruction in our streets.
     As the next representative for Fox Hill, I can only pledge to work seriously and assiduously to get to the bottom of this problem of violence in our communities.  We must get the gunmen off the streets and make the place safe for decent people to inhabit. The FNM has failed the young people of The Bahamas. And part of getting rid of crime is to get rid of the FNM.
     I think that Hubert Ingraham is a direct contributor to the violent spirit within our young people with his blatant, rude, nasty, pusillanimous and jelly backed attacks on our institutions and our men and women of wisdom.  He is a newly jumped up, Johnny come lately who wants to belong and feels like that boy in from the island that the Nassau society continues to reject him like those people  I spoke about last week who allowed that little boy to peep through the window of the dance but would not  allow him come to come into the dance because he was the wrong colour and the wrong social class.
     We have a man who has become the king but like the Emperor Jones, hates his subjects because they remind him of whence he came. Their very blackness disturbs him, and it makes him vulnerable in his negotiations with our foreign partners because he always wants to show that he is smarter than they are or just as good as they are, and especially to show that he is smarter than other Black people. It is no surprise then that he gives away the store.  This is a serious psychological problem.
     And so I hope tonight in what I call a sober address you will
see that I have put some time in trying to examine and explain the behavior of the man we are about to remove from office. It is not long now. What we cannot allow is someone with that deep inferiority complex, that sense of inferiority that causes him to laud it over us and destroy the civility of our society to continue to do so.  We must excise him, excise him, cut him out like a surgeon cuts out a lump and puts it in the tissue incinerator.
     All PLPs must therefore rise to this occasion.  We ought to stand behind our leaders.  We know that we are secure in who were are: strong, proud Bahamians.  Not cowards, hiding under the shadow of another race and holding on to the gown tails of his female political friends, in fact hiding behind their gown tails.
     Wednesday 27 February, these proposals of Mr. Ingraham must be rejected.  Whenever someone comes to you as says sign here, sign here and does not want to give you a chance to read and inwardly digest be very wary.  You have lived under the present constitution so you know what we have.  And Mr. Ingraham is surely a case of what that Bahamian song says: look what you could get when you tired of what you gat.
     I urge you to wake up on Wednesday and vote NO. And then on to the General Election where we must defeat Mr. Ingraham and his band of interlopers and consign them to the scrap heap of history where they belong.
     PLP ALL THE WAY!  I thank you and good night.
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