There are Cordel loyalists behind “di zinc fence” who are not happy with people back here who they believe are UDP. The people who work at Kremandala are of different political persuasions. It’s not like the old days. When we moved the newspaper to Partridge Street in the latter part of 1972, everybody who worked here was UBAD, even the printer. As the years have gone by, and the numbers of our employees have increased, that is not the case any more. In fact, there are people working here at Kremandala who know almost nothing about the original UBAD.
The SPEAR poll released this week contains some dramatic statistics. The poll suggests that the UDP will win the next general elections in a big way. This is no news to those Belizeans who are not PUP fanatics. The most startling thing about the poll, to my mind, is that it indicates that almost twice as many Belizeans would vote for a third party as would vote for the PUP. This no doubt will change as we get closer to the general elections, and the PUP money and machinery begin to assert themselves, but the 2 to 1 ratio in favor of a third party over the PUP as of October 31, 2006, is still stunning.
For me personally, the way the UDP media have chosen to ignore the recent rape incident at the UB dorm in Belmopan, sends the message that powerful people in the UDP continue to have personal issues with me. If I were still the UB chairman, as I was from 2000 to 2004, the UDP would certainly have made a big thing about the dorm incident.
My problems with the UDP go back to maybe as far back as late 1971. Opposition NIP Leader, the late Philip Goldson, had asked myself and UBAD to form a coalition with his NIP for the December 1971 Belize City Council elections.
I had been teaching at Wesley College for just a few weeks when the NIP proposal materialized. The Methodist board at Wesley College had given me a job when I hadn’t been working for two years. In fact, in late 1970 when I was headed towards some kind of disaster, in between two Supreme Court trials, the word had come that if I was acquitted in my second Supreme Court trial, scheduled for January 1971, I would be offered a Wesley College job.
Let us now go back to August 21 of 1969, when there was a fight that Thursday night between UBAD and CIVIC at the Harley’s Open Lot. (CIVIC was an arm of the NIP. The CIVIC leaders were Allan Griffith, Shubu Brown and Buntin Fuller – all deceased. Fuller, in fact, became a Deputy Leader of the NIP, and was one of those in charge when the NIP entered the UDP in 1973.) A couple nights after the fight, Goldson’s printing press, on which he printed The Belize Billboard, burned down. The press was either beneath Mr. Goldson’s family residence or next to it.
I can’t say if the Billboard was still the leading newspaper in British Honduras at the time. The Reporter had introduced offset technology to Belize in 1967, and because of its ability to reproduce photographs immediately, The Reporter had become quite popular.
The Billboard press was fully insured, and after the fire Mr. Goldson purchased the equipment to take his newspaper into the modern offset age. He even sent several Billboard employees to Miami, Florida to train for offset printing.
The NIP followers blamed UBAD for the fire. But I can publicly swear to Mrs. Goldson and her children that I had absolutely nothing to do with that. If Mr. Goldson had any reason to consider me a suspect, he would never have approached me, as he did, in 1971. The people who benefited from that fire politically were the ruling PUP, who called general elections three months later, and Mr. Goldson’s opponents in the Opposition, who were determined to remove him as Opposition Leader.
When Mr. Goldson called me in October of 1971, his fate was already sealed. We can see that with the benefit of hindsight. Dean Lindo’s PDM boycotted the December 1971 election, and Mr. Goldson’s traditional financiers in New York City had backed off.
After the election, Shabazz and I bussed all the way to New York City, through Los Angeles, to talk to those financiers in the British Honduras Freedom Committee and find out what was going on. But in my inexperience, I did not realize that my own fate was also now sealed. I had maintained too great a loyalty to a leader who was going to be taken down. By late 1972 the new Opposition leadership, chosen and financed by New York City, was seeking to replace me as UBAD leader. I refused to be sacrificed, and so the new UDP, formally established in September of 1973, dealt with me as an enemy.
Mr. Goldson had traveled to London in January of 1972 to study law. His wife and six children went to New York City. The Billboard folded. When he returned to Belize in mid-1974, Mr. Goldson accepted his fate, even though the UDP did not announce its leader until after the October 1974 general elections. That leader was not Mr. Goldson.
The problem for me was that I never accepted the fate decided for me in New York City and on Rectory Lane. Older Belizeans know the story. In politics, you have to toe the party line. My party is UBAD. I never ran on a UDP ticket in my life. And I never will.