This week Wednesday afternoon, at a family meeting chaired by the Kremandala chairman, Evan X Hyde, at his office on Partridge Street, PUP Lake Independence area representative, Hon. Cordel Hyde, said that he was on the verge of withdrawing his candidacy in Lake Independence for the general elections to be held on March 7.
We had been hearing for the last few weeks that Cordel’s relationship with the leadership of the PUP had become a rocky one, but we had not expected that the situation would have reached this point.
We really cannot say much more with reference to Cordel’s political present and his immediate political future. As an elected member of the House of Representatives, and an area representative, Cordel will have to deal himself with the business of informing the party and the public at large.
Insofar as Kremandala is concerned, a Cordel withdrawal would mean a return to our 1993 status.
To understand Kremandala’s 1993 status, we would have to go back as far as the campaign for the September 1989 general elections. During that campaign, the Opposition PUP promised that, if elected, they would give Amandala a license to operate a radio station. Although the British Forces in Belize had been operating a private radio station for years, the UDP in early 1989 had indicated that it had no time for Partridge Street radio. Partly because of that PUP promise, the PUP, which had lost 9 out of 10 constituencies in Belize City in the December 1984 general elections, won 4 of the Belize City seats in 1989, and a narrow 15-13 victory in the national constituency races.
The KREM Radio saga which ensued was a complicated one, often a bitter one for us. Suffice to say that just three weeks after KREM began broadcasting in November of 1989, the PUP privatized the Broadcasting Corporation of Belize (BCB), the previously government monopoly station then led by Chief Broadcasting Officer, Rene Villanueva, Sr. The privatization of BCB should have been a death blow to the fledgling KREM. It was so intended. The privatization of BCB was a patent act of bad faith by the PUP Cabinet.
Things didn’t work out the way the PUP Cabinet intended. Against the odds, KREM Radio survived, to the dissatisfaction of the oligarchical elements in the PUP leadership. Thus, it was that those elements decided to give Rene Villanueva, Sr., Belize’s second private radio license in February of 1993, just four months before the PUP went on to lose power in the June 1993 general elections. How a regular public officer quickly established a national radio grid is a story which has not been completely told. The salient point is that LOVE FM was what the PUP Cabinet wanted in early 1993, because the BCB had failed to take down KREM.
Although Amandala endorsed the PUP’s Joe Coye in his 1993 Caribbean Shores candidacy, this was because the newspaper publisher had a personal vendetta with UDP Leader/Caribbean Shores area representative, Manuel Esquivel. Overall, Kremandala did not take sides in the June 1993 general elections, which were generally expected to be won easily by the incumbent PUP. Instead, although polling two thousand fewer votes than the PUP did, the UDP won the all-important seat contest, 16-13. It was perhaps the greatest upset in Belize’s general elections history.
Stunned, the PUP leadership decided to offer the Kremandala chairman their Lake Independence constituency. He proposed his second son, Cordel, instead, and the rest is history. Cordel won three straight terms as Lake I area rep, and has served from 1998 until the present. Simply put, if Cordel withdraws, we return to our 1993 status as an independent media house.