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Secretary-General.
Ministers. Delegates.
Welcome to The Bahamas.
I want to begin with a lighthouse.
A little over a hundred miles north of this room, there is a cay in Abaco called Elbow Cay. On it stands a red and white tower, eighty-nine feet high. It was first lit in 1863.
It was built by the British Imperial Lighthouse Service. One of eleven in these islands.
It was not built at our request. It was built because shipping interests elsewhere had petitioned for it.
At that time, an average of one vessel a month was wrecking on the reef off Abaco.
The light was put on our rock to protect other people’s ships, passing through our waters, on their way to somewhere else.
The people of Hope Town opposed it. Fiercely. They lived by wrecking, by salvaging what came ashore, and a light on that reef would end their trade.
They refused the builders fresh water. They sank a barge carrying the building materials.
They lost. The light went up anyway.
Hold that picture. I will come back to it.
Let me be direct about why we are here.
There is a phrase used at every conference of this kind.
The digital divide.
It is a comfortable phrase. It suggests distance. It suggests that our problem is that we have not yet arrived.
That is not our problem.
We are not absent from this economy. We are deep inside it. Our people are on the platforms. Our data is in the models. Our waters carry the cables.
Our problem is the terms.
So let me offer a different phrase, and I will ask you to take this one home with you.
Not a divide. A discount.
Call it the sovereignty discount.
The sovereignty discount is the price a country pays in every negotiation where the other side knows it has no alternative.
It never appears as a line item. It appears in the terms.
It appears in the price of capacity.
It appears in the length of an outage, because your restoration sits below a larger market in the queue.
It appears in a contract signed on Take-it-or-Leave-it terms, because the alternative offered was nothing at all.
It appears in a technical standard written in a working group you could not afford to attend, and it now governs the equipment you must buy for the next fifteen years.
It is not charged once. It compounds.
And it is invisible in the statistics we celebrate. A country can be counted as connected and still be paying it every day.
Coverage tells you the signal arrived. It does not tell you who set the price.
Three facts. That is all I will ask you to carry.
The first is about the seabed.
More than ninety-nine per cent of the world’s international data moves through cables lying on the ocean floor. Between one hundred and fifty and two hundred of them fault every year. About three repairs a week.
And there are fewer than seventy specialised repair ships on this planet.
In January 2022, a volcanic eruption cut the single cable serving the Kingdom of Tonga. The nearest repair vessel was some two thousand nine hundred miles away.
Tonga was reconnected five weeks later.
Five weeks. A sovereign nation, in the middle of a disaster, unable to be heard.
Some countries have fifty cables landing on their coast. Tonga had one.
Volcanoes are not policy. Redundancy is policy. And when that commercial model was run, nobody from Tonga was in the room.
The second fact is about money.
Data is a commodity now. Let us stop being delicate about it. It is collected, cleaned, priced, bundled and traded. It is the raw material of the most valuable enterprises in human history. Our citizens produce it every hour of every day, and we supply it without an invoice.
Then look at where the value is booked. In advanced economies, digitally deliverable services are more than sixty per cent of all services exports. In the least developed countries, fifteen. Around eighty per cent of new digital investment projects across the Global South land in just ten countries.
The input is taken from everywhere. The value is recorded in a few places. And we buy the finished product back, in foreign currency, at a price we had no hand in setting.
I will not use history as decoration. But I would be failing you if I did not name it. The Caribbean has seen this arrangement before. Raw material leaves the harbour. Finished value returns at somebody else’s price. We know it from sugar. We know it from salt.
This time, the commodity is us.
The third fact is about where our lives are now stored.
Africa, a continent of one and a half billion people, holds under one per cent of the world’s data centre capacity. Three companies hold roughly two thirds of the world’s cloud.
So when a minister in this room says our national records are in the cloud, let us be precise about what that means.
They are on a continent that is not ours. In a building we cannot enter. Under a law we did not pass and cannot amend.
Everything passes over us. Almost nothing stops.
Now, the answer that always comes back. Usually in the corridor. Rarely in the chamber.
That technology moves faster than law. That the market will settle it. That small states must take what is offered.
That all of this is, in the end, inevitable.
I want to stay on that word. Because in my experience it has never once been a neutral word.
Let me be candid. I have spent a long time now in places where terms are set. Negotiating rooms. Finance meetings. Conferences very much like this one.
Inevitability is not a description of the future. It is a demand about the present.
It asks you to stop negotiating. It asks you to accept today what has not yet happened. It asks you to treat another party’s preference as your destiny.
It is a decision with the signature scraped off.
Because every element of what we are discussing was decided by named people. Spectrum allocation. Orbital coordination. Landing rights. Licence conditions. Technical standards. Tax treatment.
Each one has an author. Each one has minutes. Each one has a file, and the file has a date on it.
Nothing that requires a licence was ever inevitable.
But I want to go further than that, because the argument I have just made is only the easy half.
The real damage is not what is said to us. The real damage begins when we start saying it ourselves.
A government that accepts inevitability stops governing. It begins administering decisions taken somewhere else. It stops asking what is right for its people and starts asking only what is permitted.
And a country that stops asking loses the habit of asking.
Institutions forget how.
Officials stop drafting.
Ministers stop pressing.
Nobody refuses anything, because refusing looks unserious.
Sovereignty is very rarely taken from a nation. It is conceded. One reasonable concession at a time.
Each concession is defensible on the day it is made. That is exactly what makes them dangerous. Nobody can point to the moment a country stopped deciding for itself.
And I will be candid about my own region, because I am not here to lecture anyone from a clean position.
We have used that word too.
We have sat in meetings and told ourselves we were too small, too late, too poor, too few.
We have called our own inaction realism.
We have described a choice we did not want to make as a constraint we could not escape.
Inevitability is comfortable for governments as well. It relieves us of the burden of ever having tried.
So I am not asking anyone in this room to be braver than we have been. I am asking all of us to stop granting ourselves the excuse.
And let us be clear that refusing that word has a record behind it.
In this hemisphere we have heard it before, used to defend far worse than a licensing regime.
Our ancestors on these islands were told the system that held them was permanent. Natural. Necessary. That its removal would bring ruin.
That it was, in the end, inevitable.
It was none of those things. It was a policy. And it ended when enough people, in enough rooms, decided that it would end.
Forty years ago the world was told the chemicals thinning the ozone layer could not be taken out of industry. That the cost was impossible. That the direction was already set.
Governments met. They signed a protocol. Ninety-nine per cent of those substances have since been phased out, and the ozone layer is on course to return to its 1980 levels around the middle of this century.
The sky is repairing itself because a room like this one refused that word.
And on a far smaller scale, so did we. We were told a country of four hundred thousand people could not issue the first central bank digital currency in the world. We were told to wait for consensus.
Consensus arrives after the rules are written. By then the only thing left to negotiate is the date of your compliance.
So let me put it as plainly as I know how.
Inevitability is the alibi of the comfortable. It is a bill somebody else has already decided you will pay. And it is always handed to the party with the least power in the room.
We will not accept it as an explanation. We will not accept it as a defence. And we will not accept it as an excuse for failing to act in the public good.
If a thing can be decided, it can be decided differently.
Every inevitability has an author. This week, let us insist on meeting them.
Which brings me back to Hope Town.
I told you the wreckers lost. They did. But I want to be honest about something, because I think it is the most useful thing I can offer this Forum.
They were fighting the wrong thing.
They fought the light. The light was never the enemy. That light saved lives on that reef.
What was wrong was not the technology.
What was wrong was that it was built on their rock, at their cost, for other people’s ships, and nobody asked them anything.
They should not have sunk the barge. They should have demanded the keys.
I say that because I want nobody here to misunderstand what The Bahamas is proposing.
We are not here to sink the barge.
We are not hostile to investment. We are open, and we intend to stay open. Many of you in this room are our partners.
Nor am I proposing that data be walled inside borders for its own sake.
Interoperability is a technical standard. Sovereignty is a legal capacity.
A country can hold both. And only countries that hold both can be relied upon to keep this network open when it is tested.
To those who say rules deter capital, I have been Minister of Finance long enough to know the opposite is true.
Capital is not frightened by rules. Capital is frightened by uncertainty. A vacuum has to be priced as risk. Tell an investor, in law, what you intend, and they will build.
We are not asking anyone to dim the light.
We are asking for the keys.
And understand, we do not ask from weakness.
We are told we are small. Thirty-nine Small Island Developing States. Sixty-five million people. Less than one per cent of the world’s population.
That is the number people use to explain why we are not consulted.
Here is the number they leave out.
Small Island Developing States hold roughly sixteen per cent of the world’s exclusive economic zones. On average, each of us governs an ocean twenty-eight times the size of our land.
The cables that carry ninety-nine per cent of the world’s data cross our waters.
They land on our shores, under our licences, on terms our regulators write.
The satellite constellations that intend to serve the next billion people need spectrum, market access and landing authority, and a great deal of that authority sits with countries the size of ours.
We are not a small constituency. We are a small population with an enormous jurisdiction.
Those are different things. It is long past time we negotiated like it.
So here is my request. It can be acted on before any of us fly home.
This Forum produces Opinions. They are not binding. But they travel. The Plenipotentiary Conference sits in Doha in November. What is agreed in Nassau in September will be argued in Doha in November. What is settled in Doha will govern the next four years.
Small Island Developing States have never yet arrived at a forum like this with a single position. We have arrived with grievances. With delegations. With hope.
Never with a position.
Let us change that here.
Five points.
Data. That the personal data of our citizens is a protected national interest, in our law and in our agreements. That cross border transfer is negotiated, never assumed. That where our data creates value, a share of it returns as local processing, local skills and local revenue.
Control, rather than ownership. A state does not need to own a cable to govern it. It needs enforceable landing rights, open access obligations, licence conditions with real conditions in them, and a regulator with the standing to hold a global company to its word.
Resilience. Telecommunications treated in law as critical national infrastructure, with duties of redundancy and restoration written for what actually happens to an island.
Tonga waited five weeks. That number should shame this industry.
Let us seek a minimum redundancy standard and priority access to repair capacity together, through this Union, rather than one small government at a time.
Space. Orbital and spectrum resources are a shared inheritance, not a race that finishes before we have entered it. Satellites can close our distances faster than any cable we could finance, and I welcome them.
They can also place the connectivity of a sovereign state in the hands of one company that answers to no parliament in this room.
Both of those things are true. Our policy has to be strong enough to hold both.
Capability. People, regulators, engineers, teachers, negotiators. Let us build one shared technical facility, so that the next time a standard is written, there is a delegate in the room who can read the annex.
Five points. One position. Nassau to Doha.
And if we cannot agree all five this week, then let us at least agree the mechanism. A caucus. With a chair, a secretariat, and a reporting date before November.
I would rather leave this hall with a working process than a beautiful communique.
Let me finish at home.
Seven years ago this week, a Category 5 hurricane stopped over Abaco and Grand Bahama and stayed there.
Sixty-seven people confirmed dead. Two hundred and eighty-two never found. Three point four billion dollars in damage and losses. A quarter of everything this country produces in a year.
I am not telling you that for sympathy. Sympathy has never repaired a cable.
I am telling you because of what people needed in the hours after that storm.
Not a platform. Not a device. A signal.
Somebody’s daughter needed to say I am alive. Somebody’s mother needed to hear it.
In Tonga, for five weeks, an entire nation could not say it.
That is what this Forum is finally about. Underneath the acronyms and the working groups and the draft Opinions, it is about whether a small country can be heard at the moment it most needs to be.
Now. That lighthouse at Hope Town.
In 1973, when we became independent, the keys passed from the Imperial Lighthouse Service to us.
Every other light in these islands was automated, or switched off.
Not that one.
Bahamians kept it. It is still wound by hand. It still burns kerosene. It is the last lighthouse of its kind anywhere on earth, and it is kept alive by a society of volunteers on a small cay in Abaco.
Dorian put it out.
Bahamians lit it again.
So understand what the small islands are saying to you this week.
We are not asking to be protected. We are not asking to be prioritised. We are asking to be present when the terms are set, and we are organising ourselves to make that unavoidable.
And we are refusing the word inevitable. From this week forward.
We will not be priced by our size.
We will not be governed by our absence.
And we will not accept a discount on our sovereignty.
The light is on our rock.
This time, we hold the keys.
Before I take my seat, it would be remiss of me not to place one further matter before this Forum.
The Commonwealth of The Bahamas has nominated Mr Stephen Bereaux as its candidate for the office of Deputy Secretary-General of this Union, and I ask, respectfully for your support in Doha in November.
He is a Bahamian. He led our telecommunications regulator before he came to serve this organisation, and he has spent more than twenty years in precisely the rooms I have described to you this evening.
Since that office was created it has been held by Cameroon, by Kenya, by Brazil, by China, by the United Kingdom and by Lithuania. Each of them served this Union honourably.
Not one of them came from a Small Island Developing State. I would be failing my country, and failing the argument I have just put to you, if I left this platform without asking.
So I ask. Support Stephen Bereaux.
Thank you.