Op-Ed — contributed

BELIZE CITY, Thurs. June 13, 2024

PART I

Sitting at lunch overhearing two “sergeants” tell it as they see it.

“So, the new course is for females only; what happened to gender equality?”

“There will never be gender equality; it’s who you know. Like me, I’ll never get another rank.”

And so, you learn that it is not only you who feels, sees the abject failure of the leadership of the Belize Defence Force. Where does it all begin? If it’s leadership we speak of, naturally, it begins at the top. But where is the top? Instinctively, we directly look to the minister responsible for the Defence Force. But sadly, it is not as straightforward as that. I’ll show you.

Firstly, let us look at our laws.

Division 2 of the Constitution of Belize, sections 110D and 110C, creates and defines the constitutionally identified and empowered body:

“110C. -(1) There shall be established for Belize a Security Services Commission”

“Subject to the provisions of this section, the power to appoint persons to hold or act in offices in the security services, including the power to make appointments, and to deal with all matters relating to the conditions of service of such officers and, subject to the provisions of section 111 of this Constitution, the power to exercise disciplinary control over persons holding or acting in such offices and the power to remove such persons shall vest in the Security Services Commission established under section 110C of this Constitution.”

Clear enough? Well, right above the section that speaks to the SSC, there’s the one that speaks about the Public Services Commission (I think the PSC is more familiar to the masses). Clearer yet? Yes? NO! In comes the Defence Act.

“9.-(1) There shall be a Belize Defence Board hereinafter referred to as the “Board”…”

“The Board shall be responsible, under the general authority of the Minister, for the formulation of policy, the training and administration of the Belize Defence Force, the structural organization of the Belize Defence Force, and for such other functions as may be assigned to it from time to time.”

So, who is really in charge of the men and women of the BDF? Did I just expose a legal conundrum? It is not that complicated, really, if the law is followed and the persons of the duly appointed bodies know and do their jobs. But, alas, that is not the case. Members of the SSC are largely unknown. Many persons do not even know there is such a thing as the SSC [Security Services Commission]. Who do they know? They know the minister. After all, the climate in the country is that the power lies in Cabinet. Ministers are demigods in Belize, and the SSC is some nebulous abstract entity up there in the ‘Belmopshere’. And so, this very important function that the Commission has, this constitutionally granted power, has gone to the Defence Board. The decisions that determine who gets promoted and who gets appointed to whatever billet are done at the hands of the Minister and the Board. This is wrong!

Take a second look at the functions of the Board: policy, administration, training and structural organization. Nowhere says it gets to appoint or promote or to otherwise deal with matters of such officers. That’s the function of the Commission. Remember “the power to appoint persons to hold… and to deal with all matters…of such officers….” But yet, we’ve found a rash of decisions going to the Defence Board, and the Board acting on them, outside their powers!!! Let me try to simplify. The Board gets to say that the BDF is to have a unit with 3 captains; it does not get to say who those captains are to be. That power, that function, that responsibility is for the Commission. These powers, functions and responsibilities have been conflated and confused, which leads to them being misrepresented and misused (by the minister and his minions).

So then, if the minister does not know his powers as it relates to the BDF, what do we expect from the organic BDF leadership? The Commander and his headquarters staff? A lot of power is in knowledge. And a lot of that knowledge comes from reading and basic reading comprehension. What we’ve come to realize is simply that they don’t read. So, what you really have is a bunch of glorified boy scouts, with no idea what the power structure legally is, making them no more than lackeys in uniform.

I think this brings me to the real matter I wish to discuss. What can be done against such inept leadership? The CBDF [Commander, BDF] is appointed by the Prime Minister as a ‘107’ appointee. The nature of his job makes him a quasi-politician. I don’t think there is any delusion there. However, because of experience, military education and other specialized training required, no civilian can possibly do the job as it should be done. Therefore, you find that this person is invariably a career military officer, which is distinct from what we often have in other ministries, where department heads are downright cronies or crony-related and affiliated. So, the candidate who becomes the Commander has to be as apolitical as he can be, while knowing he will have to deal with and delve into the political realm, not by choice, but by career character. He serves at the pleasure of the Prime Minister.

This has become such a distorted principle. It has come to mean ‘untouchable, answerable to nobody’. This needs to be fixed. Especially in an organization that depends heavily on morale. The serving members need to be provided with a mechanism for internal critique or peer review. It cannot have leadership that has no recall mechanism. There must be a way for the rank and file to signal to the decision makers, that they have lost the confidence of the leadership of the force. I’ve been told by some reliable sources that this Commander is considered weak by many (shaken by a Guatemalan officer many ranks below him), and his integrity is questionable (some believe he does not say what he means or means what he says), and his reasoning during decision making is viewed as illogical (like putting soldiers back at a building that has been condemned).

All that being said, the point I want to make here, is that the SSC and the DB are two disparate entities. But somehow, we have allowed the DB to hijack the SSC’s functions. The DB does things that the SSC knows nothing about, until somebody who’s affected negatively cries about it. And even then, the process takes forever to be presented to the audience to which it is legally supposed to.

(To be continued with Part II)