Clearly, Deputy Prime Minister I. Chester Cooper is following the lead of his boss and has himself decided to embrace distortion, misrepresentation, and cherry-picking of facts to mask his failures both in Tourism and in fostering a better investment climate in the country.
The DPM needs only to descend from his ivory tower and talk to Bahamian entrepreneurs and business people so that they can tell him that this Davis/Cooper Administration has succeeded only in burdening our small and large Bahamian businesses with more taxes, more red tape, and more frustration.
We didn’t need the recent report by the Americans to tell us that the Davis/Cooper administration is putting a stranglehold on commerce and investment. Those of us in Parliament who listen to our constituents have known this and pointed it out over these difficult four years. This PLP government has taken the country backwards, and it has become harder to get into business and to stay in business.
As for our declining tourism, the Deputy Prime Minister blatantly misrepresents the facts. Last week, he reportedly claimed that 2024 was a “record-setting” year for stopover tourism. This is simply not true.
The Central Bank’s Annual report for 2024 states: “Air arrivals, indicative of high-yielding stopover visitors, declined slightly by 0.2% to 1.7 million, following a 17.0% gain in the year prior.”. So no, given that 2024 was down marginally from 2023, it could not have been a record-setting year. The Minister of Tourism would know this.
We note two press reports from the DPM this week, where he is cherry-picking selective statistics on tourism arrivals from one country and consumer sentiment from a next country to mask the fact that our most critical segment of our tourism industry is in reverse.
We can only conclude that the DPM feels compelled to misrepresent easily verifiable information in a futile effort to deflect from the fact that for some 14 months straight, the monthly stopover tourism numbers have been trending down, compared to the previous periods.
Of course, the DPM’s excuse about a lagging American demand contributing to our stagnant stopover tourism segment does not comport with reality. According to TourismAnalytics.com, close to 70 percent of Caribbean destinations are seeing increases in stopover tourism during 2025. Of course, these are destinations that also typically rely on the USA as their primary source market. The obvious question is: Given that we all in the region depend on American tourists, why are most Caribbean destinations continuing to see increases in their stopover tourism while we are declining?
The truth is that despite their endless spin and public relations, the leadership of the PLP has failed the Bahamian people over and over. This is why Bahamian families are going to grapple with a cost-of-living crisis, record-high BPL bills, failing public infrastructure, and endless scandals.