During the Heads of Agreement insurrection by the Belizean people in 1981, I supported Bro.Odinga Lumumba’s actions one hundred percent. In that instant, the Belizean people successfully rejected, in essence, the Webster Proposals wrapped and repackaged as the Heads of Agreement.

Since then, with the insistence of Belizean politicians both past and present, along with career bureaucrats, they have successfully pushed the nation into the abyss of the real possibility of altering its long-established and internationally recognized borders.

I have been engaged in the resistance side of the attempt to cede land and sea and, by extension, valuable natural resources, to Guatemala, dating back to the Heads of Agreement as a youth, the infamous Maritime Areas Act of 1991, the Special Agreement (Compromis), referring to our border as an Adjacency Zone, and now the effort to place the entire nation up for arbitration at the ICJ.

I believe that if Belizeans agree to capitulate under the ICJ, it will be likened to walking through a door of no return. No independent nation on the planet would entertain or subject their people to such a fate.

When you comb over all the so-called “legal opinions” and I emphasize “opinion”, and posturing by the hirelings, they have essentially committed themselves to the will of the metropolitan centers of power. The will of the Belizean people is irrelevant and the bogus referendum has been fixed with the deliberate exclusion of tens of thousands of Belizean citizens of the diaspora and the empowerment of Guatemalan citizens in Belize with the right to vote, despite its being unconstitutional.

The fact that this cruel sacrilege and wicked exclusion of Belizean citizens has not created combustion powerful enough to bring this current regime to its knees, is astonishing.

While there are some who have been the beneficiaries of party politics in Belize, naturally, they believe it’s the best thing since the creation of sliced bread. In my judgment, party politics as practiced in Belize is one of the greatest impediments to our growth and health as a people and nation.

We were divided on the road to independence by party politics and we have been divided yet again on the most serious national crisis facing the nation today, by party politics. Whether to submit the national sovereignty of the nation under a foreign jurisdiction that can possibly alter the country’s frontiers is beyond partisan allegiance.

To politicize the so-called educational campaign and unleash desperate measures such as having area reps pushing their constituency to vote a specific way underscores what is at stake for the aforementioned. This is about our very existence as a people and nation-state. But every ad-hoc policy that has been implemented by the PUDP since independence has triangulated the country to what it has become today.

In closing, there is no guarantee that the regime will abide by the outcome of the referendum if the result is not consistent with what their international handlers demanded. Indeed, their hired hit man in the form of Assad Shoman publicly stated that Belize can face retaliatory punishment if it does not follow the script.

Belize is the most valuable real estate in our region, but like many former colonized countries, the natives are merely occupying a space that in real terms is valuable to the petroleum, uranium, gold, dolomite industries and serves as a beautiful natural playground for the wealthy capitalists.

For the most part, local political leadership has flawlessly followed the developmental model that was prescribed for them.From my observation, the strategy to complete the ICJ demand has applied the doubt factor. Good lawyers know that if you can create enough doubt in a jury, a single person who is undecided can throw the case into a hung jury.

Many Belizeans are confused regarding the content and consequence of going to the ICJ. In my view, this is deliberate and reflective of why Belizeans have remained relatively uniform regarding the existential threat of the Guatemala claim for decades.

I remain hopeful that despite all the impediments erected to herd the Belizean people in a designated direction, they will become awakened and rise up and take ownership of our destiny.

Belize never had to fight a war of independence and it never had to fight a civil war to determine the direction of the nation. But life and circumstance have a way of imposing justice and equilibrium, whether we resist or embrace it.

Tomorrow was yesterday and the future is today. What are we going to do with our moment of infinity?