There was a brilliant and famous Belizean football player who got hooked on crack cocaine in the prime of his career. This happened about fifteen or twenty years ago. Our Kremandala media organization hinted at his predicament in our reports. Nobody else wanted to say anything publicly. In fact, one prominent sportscaster from another media house attacked our hints as “kicking a man when he’s down.”
Well, the truth is that crack cocaine is a problem which you have to admit before you can begin to fight against it. This is true of most personal problems.
The same prominent sportscaster got himself into the middle of a major football dispute between Kremandala and the Bowen & Bowen empire exactly twenty years ago. As had been his wont before and as has been his wont ever since, he began talking against Kremandala. He was warned, by us, that this dispute was a huge matter, and, in fact, bigger than he and his personal “beef.” He refused to back off, however, and so we had to send a message, in code. Even though the message was coded, it was public, and the sportscaster’s friends expressed the opinion that we had bullied him.
There is today a certain gentleman active in the Opposition PUP propaganda media who was the editor of this newspaper, Amandala, between 1992 and 1996. The circumstances of his termination were not dignified, but it was not necessary to publicize the facts. And we did not do so. Everybody makes mistakes, although some mistakes are worse than others.
The Musa/Fonseca faction of the PUP, which was disgraced in the general elections of February 2008, is a very wealthy clique of individuals. After a few months of the Johnny Briceño leadership of the now Opposition PUP, this Musa/Fonseca “old guard” began to publish their own weekly newspaper. They used this newspaper to attack the Briceño leadership, but over these almost two years their next favorite target, for whatever their reasons, has been the publisher of Amandala, Evan X Hyde.
The former Amandala editor to whom we referred, had enjoyed a soft landing when he was asked to leave Amandala in September of 1996, finding a friendly working relationship with the then Belize City Council Mayor, Joe Coye. Coye went on to win the Caribbean Shores seat for the PUP in 1998, and became a powerful Cabinet Minister for all the ten years of the two Musa/Fonseca governments.
After the PUP’s election debacle and subsequent leadership change in early 2008, the former Amandala editor surfaced as a columnist for The Belize Times, which, after a period of instability, had become the newspaper organ of the Briceño leadership of the PUP. Then, the former Amandala editor became the host of the important morning talk show on the radio station owned by the Briceño leadership. And then, he began to write for the Musa/Fonseca weekly, the same weekly which had made Johnny Briceño their prime target for almost a year and a half.
It was surely an exhibition of supreme agility to be writing for two newspapers which were so openly and extremely hostile to each other. This went on for a couple months at least. Recently, the former Amandala editor has not been writing for The Belize Times, only for the Musa/Fonseca weekly. Still, the public contradiction continued, because he is writing for the Musa/Fonseca newspaper while remaining the host of the Briceño morning radio talk show.
Perhaps flushed with the success of his intra-party political gymnastics, the former editor of the Amandala last week decided to “show himself.” He became personal in the Musa/Fonseca weekly with the man who used to sign his paychecks on Partridge Street. No doubt the gentleman wants to show his new employers how brave he is, but it is for sure that in this particular case, discretion will be the better part of valor.
One of the problems in this country may be that the place is confused with all the chatter of hired lightweights. But, everybody has to make a living. We will not, however, sit by and tolerate the discrediting of the accomplishments of the Kremandala semi-pro basketball team between 1992 and 1996. We especially will not tolerate it from one who knows better, and, finally, we will not tolerate it from a man who has skeletons in his closet. Mr. Man, you are diving into water which is too deep for you. For you, drowning, we submit, becomes a distinct danger. It is written.