Dear Major Jones, I read your columns in the Reporter every week, and many times I am rewarded because you are so much within the belly of the beast that you can and do provide insider information that increases our understanding of how our political leaders run the show in our country.

I say thanks for all that; however, today I have to throw up a caution flag about your article, “Karen and Candice!”, which was published last week. You hib some big blows when you said that those of us who complain about the Mrs. Karen Bevans contract, and like contracts, are ticked off because we have become an envious people, a people who don’t like to see others earning far bigger salaries than we do, and you said some of us in this country don’t like to pay for talent.

On the matter of remuneration for services from the public purse, I will point out that there is evidence that the Father of the Nation was not gung ho on these fat salaries. Former government minister, Brother Hector Silva, tells us all the time what his salary was while he was a minister of government.

Ah, you are on page with former PM, Dean Barrow, when he said he was surprised that Belizeans thought that CEOs in his government were taking home princely pay. It might not be perfectly healthy, but I would think it natural that someone making $3.30 an hour would notice someone who is taking home fifty dollars per hour from the public purse. I think I’d give people a pass there for complaining a bit.

Some Belizean doctors in the US earn in one year what a bottom earner in our country won’t earn in a lifetime. I respect their expertise, but I don’t see our country paying them. I am sorry, I am going to a friendly country like Cuba, for my expert, or to friendly countries like the USA and the UK, for expert doctors who have made their mint and are now altruistic. I’m not suggesting that Belizean doctors in the US are better than the ones who work at home, just stating the obvious, that anyone who wants to earn their kind of pay has to appreciate the difference in our economies.

While we’re here on these top earners, I must point out that I do not like that the children of people who are in the top bracket in salaries are competing with the children of people earning $3.30 an hour for scholarships paid for from the public purse. A noh deh wid that.
On this matter of talent, if we accept that that is a very subjective matter, we will agree that no former administration should choose talent for an incoming one, and the poster boy for that is our former PM, the man who chose the present Director of Tourism at the BTB. Hmm, if we accept that PM Barrow was an honest man, then we have to conclude that he was likely a very poor judge of talent, and/or character.

Not only did he choose his son to head BTL, the richest government-owned business in the country, but he went outside of government to choose high-priced lawyers, one at a thousand dollars an hour, to fight cases you didn’t have to have a law degree to know we couldn’t win in an international court.

Talent is to die for, and most times you have to pay for it, especially when that talent is so superior to anyone else around and it demands the big bucks. In that vein, I note that the new government thought so much of your talent that they gave you a big job at the Port. I read that somewhere. Forgive this lee personal bit, but are you and they hashing up a contract that will take you well past 2025, and you are worried that Melvin Hulse will run again, and defeat Rado, and he will ask for the Ministry that controls Port Affairs, just so he can give you the boot because he, in his ignorance, doesn’t recognize that you are the best talent in Belize for the job?

Braa, if the people vote for Mel, that means they have decided that they want his judgment to rule. There is only one place where you should be able to get the kind of protection the previous administration bestowed on its favorites, and that is in the public service. Maybe that’s why their salaries are a lot more like that of regular folk.

Looking specifically at the lady’s contract, which you pointed out wasn’t signed just before the election, you said you judge it to be “commensurate with her role as the head of Belize’s tourism industry: our largest single foreign exchange earner.” You said the level of responsibility of the executive must be considered, and also “the compensation history of the executive, the talent and experience the executive brings to the table, and of course the organization’s balance sheet.”

I don’t believe our political leaders are out-and-out crooks; I believe they simply use your same rationale to ease their little conscience over their raiding our resources. What a paltry salary a minister gets for presiding over a 50, 60, 80, 100 million-dollar-a-year budget. Why do these politicians feel entitled to our property? It is because in their little minds it is their genius that found oil, their genius that led us to borrow money at cheap rates, their genius that made deals that saved the people money, and they want their cut.

Our political leaders do have license to pay fat salaries to employees of quasi-government bodies, but a sitting administration really shouldn’t give out contracts that effectively take away the license of an incoming one to choose the talent they want.

The last government saw the lady as the best talent for BTB, and she was paid extremely well. Ah, I side with George about salaries paid from the public purse, and you’re with Dean.

On criminal matters, is it really justice denied?

It is a FACT that 50 years ago the majority of persons arrested for murder were found guilty, and before 50 years ago they were sent to the gallows. Without absolute accuracy, as much as 95% of persons accused of murder were found guilty at that time, and in 2020, and recent decades, 95% of persons accused of murder are found not guilty.

There is a cry from the lawyer fraternity that in the modern Belize persons accused of murder languish in jail for too long, for years before they are tried in court.

It is a suspicion of some regular folk that the reason why these trials don’t come up quickly is that the police know the information they have against the accused is not sufficient to get a guilty verdict from a modern jury in the age we live in, so to go to court is to turn loose a party who in days gone by would 95% of the time have climbed the steps to the gallows.

We shouldn’t be tripping over our feet to please these lawyers. They holler justice denied, when they know that the system needs major fixing.

Janus has offered his solution. They don’t want that. I have put forward my solution. They definitely don’t want that. Well, what do these learned lawyers offer to fix the system, or don’t they give a daam that most of the acquittals they win are fraud jobs because our system isn’t ready for the age?