CARRON SHEPHERD DUMPS THE FNM AND DISUNITY

The political ground beneath Bahamian politics shifted, and the tremor was felt far beyond the walls of Gambier House. Carron Shepherd, three-time Women’s Branch president and long-time executive of the Free National Movement, crossed the floor to the Progressive Liberal Party. This was not a casual defection. It was an indictment.

Shepherd did not drift away quietly. She left with clarity and conviction, declaring a total loss of confidence in leadership and a party culture she says has hollowed out the very motto it once flaunted, All together.” When a movement that claims unity can no longer retain one of its most visible and loyal women leaders, the issue is not messaging. It is institutional failure.

This moment matters because Shepherd is not an opportunist or a marginal figure seeking relevance. She is a woman who dedicated her political life to building machinery, mobilising women, and sustaining a party, believing she was helping to build a country. What she came to believe, slowly, painfully, was that the FNM had drifted from national purpose toward self-preservation. That realization does not arrive suddenly. It accumulates through years of watching values erode while slogans remain polished.

What makes her decision resonate even more deeply is her lineage. Shepherd is the daughter of Jimmy Shepherd, a founding figure of the FNM who also served in the PLP and captured the St. Michael constituency in the historic 1967 election. In this family, politics was never tribal. It was consequential. Parties were vehicles, not destinations. That history sharpens today’s symbolism: principles over party, service over stagnation.

Her departure also exposes an uncomfortable truth that Bahamians have long sensed but rarely confront directly: women are often asked to organise, sacrifice, and mobilise, but seldom to shape direction. Shepherd rose to the highest levels of women’s leadership in the FNM, yet her exit suggests that visibility did not translate into influence. When experienced women conclude that their role is ornamental rather than strategic, loyalty becomes unsustainable.

The contrast on the other side was immediate and telling.

At the PLP, Shepherd was welcomed not as a trophy but as a partner. The presence of senior leadership was not incidental theatre; it was intentional signalling. Party Chairman Fred Mitchell, Secretary Barbara Cartwright, Women’s Branch Chair Calverna Small, Trustee Valentine Grimes, and Alex Storr stood front and centre, not to showcase a defection, but to affirm a direction.

The message was unmistakable: the PLP is serious about rebuilding its women’s machinery with experienced hands, not ceremonial titles. Shepherd’s pledge to serve “in every capacity the party needs” did not sound like ambition. It sounded like instruction, like a woman returning to work, she knows how to do.

That posture matters. So does the confidence with which the PLP absorbed her. There was no defensiveness, no insecurity, no fear of contamination from a former rival. Growing movements add steel. Shrinking ones obsess over loyalty tests. The difference was on full display.

For the FNM, this should be more than a moment of embarrassment. It should be a reckoning. When loyal architects walk away citing leadership failure, denial is no longer credible. Blaming personality, ambition, or betrayal only deepens the wound. Parties do not haemorrhage experienced leadership without cause. They do so when internal purpose collapses.

For the PLP, however, this moment comes with responsibility. Welcome is easy. Integration is the test. Can the party translate this symbolic moment into structural momentum, policy development, grassroots outreach, and measurable results?

Shepherd’s own words anchor this transition in history, not hype. Her return to the PLP is framed not as conversion, but as homecoming, rooted in her father’s legacy of service, sacrifice, and nation-building. Her recollection of labour rights, social reform, and national development is a reminder of what politics looks like when it is animated by purpose rather than preservation.

Her endorsement of Prime Minister Philip Davis for a second term is therefore not merely partisan. It is philosophical. It signals alignment with leadership she believes is building rather than breaking, governing rather than posturing.

Carron Shepherd’s move is provocative because it punctures comfort on both sides. It tells the FNM that loyalty is not infinite. It tells the PLP that opportunity carries obligation. And it tells the country something even more unsettling: when a woman who has given decades to a political institution decides she can no longer recognize it, the failure is not hers.

She did not abandon politics. She rejected a version of it that stopped believing in the people it claimed to serve. In doing so, she forced a question Bahamians can no longer afford to ignore: are our parties building a nation, or merely protecting themselves?

That question will linger long after the applause fades.

Incidentally, several members of the Women’s Association left during the Golden Isles by-election and were seen enthusiastically campaigning.

Mass exodus is an understatement.