By KEVA LIGHTBOURNE, Guardian Senior Reporter, kdl@nasguard.com

Former Prime Minister Perry Christie yesterday labeled the Free National Movement's first year in office a "failure."

Christie, who was a special guest on Island FM's radio talk show 'Parliament Street' said the FNM's biggest failure was to keep the economy of The Bahamas on track.

He accused the government of "squandering opportunities" that were available to them by the time they took to implement programs and contracts that were already negotiated.

Ironically, Christie's comments came as members of the FNM attended a service at New Covenant Baptist Church to celebrate their first anniversary since winning a majority of seats in Parliament following last year's general election.

The talk show, which was hosted by veteran broadcaster Steve McKinney and lawyers Fayne Thompson and Craig Butler, touched on a number of issues affecting the country today, including the economy, jobs, the rising oil prices, the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME), the European Partnership Agreement (EPA), and the downturn in the U.S. economy.

"My party left in place a set of initiatives, programs and policies, which I believe, if followed, would have assisted greatly in off-setting the impact of the recession," Christie maintained. "So to a great extent there has been a man-made impact on the recession in The Bahamas. I actually felt that we were in a position to, if not avoid, the usual negative impact of a recession in the US because of capital inflows."

Christie pointed to the Albany project and the proposed Baha Mar development, which he said the FNM "failed to carry out in any meaningful way and lost it."

He said the government is now faced with the task of trying to stimulate consumer spending, and accelerate approvals of foreign investment, encouraging as best it can the investor to start as quickly as possible.

"The job this government is faced with, is now made acutely more difficult because they failed to create and sustain jobs that were so necessary in the economy," said the former prime minister.

Christie, who represents the Farm Road and Centerville constituency, pointed to the $80 million in contracts granted to Bahamian contractors that were suspended or canceled by the FNM upon assuming office in 2002.

"The difficulty is, I expected the FNM to be no different to the governance that I tried to establish. When we came to power we met hundreds of people they had employed just before the elections in 2002. We could have made a decision to let people go, but we saw that as constituting victimization, not withstanding the fact that we could argue that these people had six months or one year contracts. We decided that they were Bahamians, that they were in need, and we should, as opposed to letting them go, increase the revenue of the country by strategies which we did to ensure that we could accommodate them. The FNM did not do that," Christie said.

"They started off in a way where they came in with an investigatory form of governance, suspicious of what the PLP had done. Their focus was wrongly placed and this country has suffered mightily as a result of that," he said.

Christie, who leads the Progressive Liberal Party(PLP), said every Bahamian ought to have reasonably expected that a government coming into power would build on the successes, as they see them, of its predecessor in office.

"Hubert Ingraham succeeding Perry Christie ought, therefore, to see what successes Perry Christie had, and rather than go on a binge of stop, review and change, decide to identify the strengths and build upon it," said the former prime minister.

But, Christie accused Ingraham of being pre-occupied with having "to implement a culture distinction to what he met in place, "too may new policies with too many new ministers, who have to first learn how to be ministers and learn their ministries and operate their ministries and that is what has taken so much time and has set the country back."