National Founders and Founding Choices.

• Author: Whaples, Robert M.
• Position: Etceteras ... - Sir Lynden Pindling

Heading home from a conference in the Bahamas a few years ago, I noticed a sign directing traffic to the Lynden Pindling International Airport. I asked the cab driver if he knew who Pindling was. Know him?! He knew all about him and had met him several times. Pindling was the "father of his country." And the driver told me that Pindling was a great man. Eager to learn more, I asked him to explain. Pindling was the first Bahamian president, after the end of British rule. A man of the people, he did much to put power into their hands and improve the educational system, I learned. Then he let the "R" word slip out--a word he seemed to want to unsay--in describing Pindling's "regime." I decided to learn more when I returned home.

As biographer Michael Craton (2002) explains, the Right Excellent Sir Lynden Pindling served as prime minister from 1973 to 1992. At his death in 2000, Anglican Archbishop Drexel Gomez eulogized him as a pioneer who "united the people and set the nation on its path out of Egypt." Others spoke of his "gift of being able to walk and talk with monarchs and ordinary people" and called him "a man of the people; a man of peace" (411). Craton notes that Pindling "hugely expanded" educational facilities, which became "available equally to all." "For the less fortunate in society medical and other social services became much more plentiful and more freely available" (418). "Most of all, however ... what Lynden Pindling did was to destroy for all time what he himself called the Black Crab mentality" in which West Indian islanders "tended to be pettily jealous of any among them who showed ambition or ability to scramble out of the common barrel, and pulled them back down again if they could" (421).

However, as Craton explains, "Pindling and his associates ... became wealthy, or wealthier, while in office.... Undoubtedly he did receive substantial gifts from time to time, 'sweetheart' loans, and generous payment for nominal services such as 'finder's fees'" (414-15). "Pindling was said to be especially careless about the notoriety of ... some of the company that he kept. He met, was even on amicable terms with, fugitives wanted in their own countries (and the United States) for drugrunning, money laundering, and other financial" crimes (416). Charges of corruption began early in Pindling's career, especially payments from mob-backed casino interests. In 1983, a report entitled The Bahamas: A Nation for Sale by investigative journalist Brian Ross aired on NBC TV, which claimed that Pindling and his government accepted bribes from Colombian drug smugglers, particularly Carlos Lehder, cofounder of the Medellin Cartel, in exchange for allowing them to use the Bahamas as a transshipment point to bring cocaine into the United States. Public outcry led to the creation of a commission of enquiry in the Bahamas. The commission found that from 1977 to 1984, Pindling spent eight times his reported earnings and that Pindling and his wife received $57.3 million in cash (Nathan 2013, 61).

It may be instructive to compare Pindling to other men from the Western Hemisphere who were known as national founders or "the fathers of their country." Table 1 summarizes the outcomes of thirty-four "national founders" from two dozen countries in the Americas, all of which achieved independence after breaking away from European powers. (1) As the table suggests, it's not generally a pretty picture.

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