I read that the teachers are going on strike, and they have every reason to be angry, because they fought so hard to get our governments to be better stewards of our economy. I would prefer that they don’t, because there’s just too much water onboard our little boat right now. Still, the pressure must be kept up until we get the good governance Belize sorely needs, the good governance the UDP 2008-2020 promised and miserably failed to deliver, the good governance the present government promised.

If the teachers have to blow off steam, hopefully it’s not for too long. The children will lose more ground, but disappointed adults are far from their best; they need to hibernate a little. Okay, the children are already far behind, because school doors have been closed over a year now, but they can catch up.

Ah, when I was a kid a hurricane that blew down Belize City and Dangriga gave me a whole year out of school, and a pandemic forced our little ones to do stay-at-home learning, with instructions from their teachers and oversight from their parents.

In my books we have to do more of this, but we have to get better at it. It is so wrong for our little ones to be forced to spend the best years of their lives in those prisons. I think the Mennonites, wisely, only imprison their children for half the day, 50% better than a whole day. The only drawback for the young ones is that, being out of prison currently, they are now too close to the television and the main lesson from the American shows is rudeness, rudeness, rudeness.

Back on course, the nurses and security officers have every reason to be angry, but because our country is so weak right now, they shouldn’t be thinking about any go slow. The public servants absolutely shouldn’t think about striking, because the effects of that on the economy would be so negative, that the government would have to cut even more.

Ah, none of our senior public officers can be blamed for the way the UDP spent our money, because they were back-benched for the prize CEOs, but they took too long to speak out because they were afraid. And then a few of them were flat out starry-eyed in love with the red party.

The salaries cut will be very painful to the majority of public employees, and it will negatively impact our economy in some areas, but we went from 47 cents out of every dollar being used to pay salaries, pensions and benefits, to 83 cents — that last figure somewhat inflated. Flat out, our economy was insufficient prior to the pandemic, for 50% of our people were living below the poverty line, and thousands of public employees were barely making ends meet.

The unfortunate thing about a little economy is that it can get blown away overnight if our leaders aren’t prudent and honest, and they haven’t been, and the fortunate thing about a little economy is that it can rebound quickly, if our leaders are capable and we keep the pressure on their tail.

We all have to pay more attention to what’s going on in our economy in the future. Government will not save $60 million through the cuts in salaries; there will be a shortfall, and there won’t be much money in the system in the next few months, but if we keep the pressure up to improve good governance, without striking, and if we keep an eye on every decision the new government makes, and if we call them out when they don’t do what needs to be done, we will make a better Belize.

Some necessary measures that can produce immediate results are improving the collection of taxes owed, and stepping up the collection of GST. The harder of the two is collecting taxes well after they accrued. That isn’t easy for a number of reasons, one being the fragility of a small country. If the person or company that owes taxes has a number of employees, it is in a strong position to fight off the tax collectors. Some will punish their employees, and some will hire attorneys to delay the process and beat down the amount they owe.

On top of those measures, we must reform the tax system so the haves stop getting breaks that are intended for the have-nots, and when we collect these taxes we must invest them properly, so that we build an economy that uplifts the masses AND pays better salaries to our public employees, especially those thousands who are barely making it.

The government needs to invest in our small entrepreneurs, Belizeans like our small citrus farmers, who have been living in hard times since the citrus greening decimated their groves, and the small sugarcane farmers, who have been struggling over a decade because of low prices for their product, and droughts and floods in recent years.

While the resistance from the BNTU and the PSU hasn’t stayed the government from making the salary cuts, because no money noh deh, great inroads have been made to speed up on promises the new government made, and more, a great shot has been fired across the bow of the far right capitalists in the PUP who are thinking about this being “their turn”, just like the “turn” the greedy ones in the disgraced UDP had between 2008 and 2020.

Life can be sour sometimes. The Esquivel 1993-1998 austerity government jettisoned 800 of its employees in 1997, and in 1998 we handed over the reins to a PUP government that had promised to grow our economy. But that government was betrayed by a few entitled individuals that were only after making themselves and their families mighty rich.

It wasn’t easy for the government’s employees to, in 2005, take to the streets, and to storm Independence Hill alongside a UDP that promised to cut down corruption, because unlike the high- risk/high-reward private sector that lives in a 24/7 world and knows both boom and bust, government employees are set in a daily 8-to-5 grind that pays a fixed salary every 15th and/or ending of the month.

It is a major disruption of their lives for them to be agitating, to be confronting their employers in any hostile way. After the change of government in 2008, they settled back into their routine, and the UDP governments slowly became the corrupt individuals they had replaced.

Thirteen years ago, in 2008, we hired a government to make right what was wrong, and we were monumentally betrayed. So, today we’re back to 1998, worse because not only is our economy dead, but we are in the middle of a health crisis.

I have to say big respect to the PM, for being so manly in the face of fum fum and electric wire. The UDP brought their crowd to Independence Hill to shout “Petro Caribe, roll it”; the PUP brought crowds to Independence Hill at different occasions, once to shout “Give Peace a Chance”, but the new PM didn’t bring a crowd to disrupt his government’s employees in their protest.

I expect the PM is embarrassed. It’s his first time as head of our country, and Cordel is embarrassed too, because he didn’t play a considerable role in the decisions of 1998 to 2003, and Francis too, because he wasn’t there during 1998 and 2003, and all those PUP leaders who are ministers of government or area representatives for the first time are hurting too, that five months into their new government their employees aren’t happy with them.

But we won’t weep for the PUP. Boots Martinez left us with big money in his socks, but he also left us with the wise counsel that politics is a big boys’ game. They made us a promise and we expect them to deliver. All a wi fu win.