Aikman had great energy and drive. And he was brave. I say this because when the UDP presented their Belize City Council candidates in 1980, just a few months after the party had collapsed in the 1979 general elections, the young Derek Aikman was on that UDP ticket. That ticket was doomed to lose. A party cannot recover that quickly after a general election defeat.

Neither the PUP or the UDP talks much about what happened in 1983 and 1984. The PUP doesn?t talk because 1983 and 1984 were when they started to lose for the first time, and the UDP doesn?t talk because there were people, including Partridge Street, who were a part of their 1983/1984 success whom they do not wish to acknowledge.

Aikman ran on the December 1983 UDP Belize City Council ticket, which won a landslide victory. Dean Barrow (who was not on the 1980 UDP City Council ticket) topped the polls for the victorious UDP in 1983, and I remember that Derek, who was second to Barrow, made an issue of the vote count because he thought he had been denied some votes. Dean Barrow and Michael Finnegan at that point, and I know this for sure, marked him as someone who had ambitions, and could possibly be a threat to Barrow. If he was not a threat, he was, definitely and at least, an internal competitor.

When the UDP began assigning constituencies for the 1984 general elections, Aikman ended up with Freetown. Prime Minister George Price had been winning that division for thirty years, and Derek was considered sure to lose. (Manuel Esquivel, who had lost to Price in Freetown in 1979, had first choice after an adjustment of electoral boundaries, and chose the new Caribbean Shores division.)

Dean Barrow, on the other hand, won a UDP convention held at Free Gardiner?s Hall (Cemetery Road) early in 1984 to choose the UDP?s Collet candidate. I am not sure if he was challenged by Hubert Elrington. But I am positive that after this UDP Collet convention, the PUP changed the electoral boundaries, expanding the number of House seats from 18 to 28. Collet was split into three ? Queen?s Square, Lake Independence and Collet. Barrow was given first choice, and, on the advice of Michael Finnegan, who had worked in the area in the 1974 and 1979 Kenneth Tillett campaigns, Mr. Barrow chose Queen?s Square. Hubert Elrington and Frank Lizama were given Lake I and Collet, respectively. These were considered PUP constituencies, and so Elrington and Lizama, like Aikman, were considered sure to lose.

It turned out that everybody UDP won in Belize City, except Ramon Vasquez in Pickstock. Aikman?s victory over George Price was the most sensational victory of all. I remember that that election night, I was hiding out in a hotel room at Bliss Hotel on Water Lane. I believed that there was a hit out on me. I believed that if the PUP won, I would be a dead man. Between 9 and 9:30 p.m. that counting night, Radio Belize broadcast the first general elections result ? Derek Aikman had beaten the political legend, the PUP icon – George C. Price, in Freetown. It was early for an election result, and it was enormous. That single result meant the UDP would win ? the PUP would lose. I went downstairs into the street and drifted toward the Swing Bridge, where a crowd was gathering. The man Aikman, who was supposed to lose, had won! Crazy.

Derek became Minister of Education. It soon became clear that as an administrator, he was not nearly as talented as he was as a campaigner. It also became clear that he was pretty close to the new Prime Minister/UDP Leader, Hon. Manuel Esquivel, who promoted him to UDP chairman in 1987, ousting Dean Lindo, the original and former UDP Leader. This was an act of power by Esquivel, and it was noteworthy that Mr. Barrow lifted not a finger to help Uncle Dean.

What went wrong inside the UDP, besides the Maritime Areas Act, after the UDP lost narrowly to the PUP in the 1989 general elections, the principals would have to say. I know that the new PUP Attorney General and Minister of Tourism, Glenn Godfrey, encouraged Aikman to go back into the airline business. In retrospect, this ?encouragement? was an act of cynicism. Aikman received huge loans from the Belize Bank and the Atlantic Bank. My sources tell me that the Belize Bank loan was for a quarter million dollars, and it was unsecured. That?s how big Derek Aikman was.

When ?they? came for Derek?s head in 1992 because he had joined Philip Goldson to form the National Alliance for Belizean Rights (NABR) in 1991, the lawyers for both the Belize Bank and the Atlantic Bank were UDP. Check it out. The people who sabotaged his airline were PUP. Powerful factions within the PUP and the UDP conspired to ?waste? Aikman. I still can?t believe it happened. And I still can?t believe how it happened.

So, you see, they play that red and blue game out here. But when they meet in the backrooms, it?s a different sankey they sing. They both work for the same financiers. They are both soft on white supremacy. I?m not Derek Aikman. Nobody can expel me from the House. My house is on Partridge Street. And the name of it is ? power to the people. Dig it.