I’m on a bit of a holiday from Amandala. Over the last few years, my responsibilities had been reduced in certain areas, but I still did an amount of rewriting and shaping, so to speak. Last week my daughter Rachael did my “rewriting and shaping” work, and one of my younger brothers did the editorial. Things worked out pretty well.
The leave of absence from the newspaper was precipitated by a burglary attack on my personal office which forced me to step back and assess my overall situation. I considered the attack a personal violation and an act of treachery.
This happened just when I had committed to resuming the Kremandala Show, which was off the air for about four months. I had been doing that radio show, which began to be simulcast on television four or five years ago, for a total of fourteen years. In the months leading up to my December 2008 decision to retire the show, I had been wondering if I needed to assume personal responsibility for some crises which had been brewing in the old capital, and indeed the nation. To assume that responsibility, I would have required a more direct electronic media format. In the midst of that examination of situation, we retired the show.
It is a tricky thing to seek to give you an idea of how big the Kremandala Show had become. In Belize, Partridge Street is treated (by some people) like Trench Town, which is to say, nothing good is supposed to come from back here. If the street vendors couldn’t give you the numbers, the oligarchs and their apologists would even try to contest the 28-year-old reality that this newspaper is the best and most popular in the nation. When the Raiders couldn’t be beaten, the oligarchs smashed the league. They expose themselves to the people, however, when all three billionaire monopolies unite to bankroll initiatives by our competitors.
And talking about competitors, we need to examine the recently concluded Summit of the Americas in Trinidad. From February, our Amandala people began to look at how we could get Adele Ramos to Port-of-Spain. As Belize’s leading newspaper, this should have been a cup of tea for Amandala, but the road is always rough on Partridge. For this newspaper, the fact that Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez would be meeting one-on-one, made the Summit a regional/hemispheric gathering where our presence was a must.
At Amandala, which is managed by Jacinta, we assumed that KREM Radio, managed by Michael, and KREM TV, managed by Mose, would participate in the venture and help defray the expenses.
But apparently KREM TV had a more ambitious project in mind. Following a visit to Jamaica and Barbados last month by Mose, he felt that KREM TV could present the Summit live to its Belizean audience.
I suppose the fact that Channel 5, after its purchase by Lord Michael Ashcroft, had ceased to present the nightly Caribbean news telecast, led the KREM TV people to suspect that the 5 people would not be interested in the Trinidad Summit.
Mose has not given me the details, but it appears that Channel 5 came on late, flexed its muscles at the Caribbean Broadcasting Union (CBU) and utilized its overall asset resources where the Summit television feed was concerned, whereupon KREM TV’s Barbados contact let us down at the very last minute.
You know, in the beginning and for many, many years under my leadership, this newspaper, brought all its business to you in these pages for your information, understanding and support. Previously in this essay, I explained to you how the three main Kremandala branches are now managed. My children do not communicate with you, the people, about every cutthroat experience they have wherein our powerful enemies go for the Kremandala jugular. They are from a different generation, and this is a new era. They do things differently from me. They are more sophisticated in business and technology. They do not cry out as much as I used to do.
I believe, however, that the people always have to know what is the Kremandala situation. Otherwise, the people will assume that all is just hunky dory and cool like that. Bottom line, Kremandala has to fight every day, especially in the global recession/depression, to protect jobs on Partridge Street. The people against whom we compete are larger than us, in every respect, which puts us at a disadvantage all the time. Napoleon Bonaparte is quoted as having famously said that, “God is on the side of the heavy artillery.” I don’t know about that, but I know this for sure – the people are on the side of Kremandala.
All power to the people.