Dear Sir,

The economy is on the verge of turning around, but it will not be noticeable until its effects have significantly increased jobs and thereby reduced unemployment.

New projects will bring back life into this stagnant economy, but we need multiple projects all running at the same time to create the kind of windfall that could remind us of the happier days.

After the Progressive Labour Party’s free fall of budget-after-budget deficits, the One Bermuda Alliance followed them up with its own blunders by stifling billions of dollars worth of projects, which might have started an early recovery.

Fortunately, with the advent of the OBA, domestic confidence increased and renewed local investments have kept the economy going.

Usually, the economy has an impact on political outcome, but I am not sure it will for this next election, which must be called in late 2017.

The job market by then will be just beginning to fill up, so rather than the masses filled with economic satisfaction and holding a reward in the ballot for fulfilling electoral promises and a job well done, I think it will be the feel-good factor that will be the determiner — like the song lyrics “The way you make me feel”.

The run-up to this next election — for many, the result is already in — will be for both parties a test of whose future design satisfies the longing for hope and prosperity for the generations to come.

The present trajectory has the OBA on a losing course, with its design more favourable to maintaining the status quo.

It would be better if the OBA rolls back the clock and takes some of the advice that was given to the old colonial parliament by the governors of the time — that Bermuda needed to step up to the modern world.

I know of opportunities that could change, modernise and diversify our economy, which has come knocking at this government’s door, but it doesn’t seem to fit its outmoded scheme.

Bermuda can no longer tolerate economic polarisation and some folks don’t yet get it.

KHALID WASI