In last Tuesday night’s Kremandala Show, Rufus X launched a direct attack on Prime Minister Dean Barrow. This was with respect to Mr. Barrow’s withdrawal of the various money laundering charges against the Belize Bank and First Caribbean Bank.
It is quite likely that people in the ruling party indicted me, as chairman of the show, for not remonstrating with Rufus more energetically. There may even be UDP elements who think that I encourage Rufus with these assaults. Kremandala Show regulars know that he has been criticizing the Prime Minister for a couple months now, but Tuesday’s was definitely the most scathing.
Rufus has a lot of credibility when he comments about the UDP. This is a man, remember, who got his left arm broken in a couple places a year ago for speaking out too forcefully against the then ruling PUP. But, more than that, Rufus X is one of the founders of the UDP, in September of 1973.
At the time, Rufus was chairman of the UBAD Party. (UBAD had become a political party in August of 1970, and had contested the 1971 Belize City Council elections in an alliance with Philip Goldson’s National Independence Party.) Rufus and Norman Fairweather, then UBAD secretary-general, led members of the UBAD Party executive into an alliance with the National Independence Party, Dean Lindo’s People’s Development Movement, and the Liberal Party, which formed the United Democratic Party. There was a split in UBAD, with the other five officers, including myself as president and Wilfred Nicholas, Sr., as vice-president, remaining independent of the new UDP.
In 1988, after 15 years of loyalty and service to the UDP, Rufus tried to contest the UDP candidate convention for Belize Rural North. He wanted to replace the incumbent, Sam Rhaburn, who was then a UDP Cabinet Minister. The UDP leadership, including Dr. Manuel Esquivel, Dean Barrow and Derek Aikman, chose to support Rhaburn. They ruled that Rufus’ delegates were PUP, or something ridiculous like that. An angry Rufus ended up running as an independent Belize Rural North candidate in the September 1989 general elections.
Despite our split in 1973, I owed personal loyalty to Rufus, and therefore supported him in 1988, although I knew that it would cause big trouble for me with the UDP brass.
My position on the present Rufus X stance, is that I can’t expect Mr. Barrow to behave otherwise from what he does. He is what he is – a consensus politician who makes “sensible” decisions. If this is what he chose to do, this is, withdraw the Belize Bank and First Caribbean indictments, then these are “sensible” decisions.
Rufus wants the Prime Minister to behave in a manner other than “sensible.” There are implications for executive behaviour which is not “sensible.” Mr. Barrow will never go down the Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez road. So then, it now appears that he and Mr. Rufus are on a collision route. This is bad news for me, but not as bad as the news was in 1988.
Twenty years later, Kremandala is organized in such a way that my responsibilities are substantially fewer than they used to be. In 1988, we were still only the newspaper, but I was under greater strain then.
Fundamentally, this column has always been about making arguments to you why you should support our processes. Belize is a place where many Belizean individuals and groups are “fronting” for other individuals and groups (some foreign) who do not want you, the Belizean people, to know who is really providing the financing and, therefore, setting the agenda. The games are many in Belize, and they are convoluted. This is because now the whole world knows that “sugar de ya.”
In order for us, the Belizean people, to get a fair share of our country’s “wealth untold,” then we, the Belizean people, must be informed, organized and mobilized. Compared to the people who have been coming into Belize over the last three decades, we are innocent and unsophisticated. Kremandala has a track record of sincerity which cannot be denied. Your trust in Partridge Street is well placed, and your support has been rewarded.
One of the people on Partridge Street whose leadership record is long standing and pristine, is Rufus X. He is a militant, and often an extremist, but he is a Kremandala original. I do not agree with the stridency of his recent attack on the Prime Minister, but Rufus is entitled to his opinions. He has been correct many times in the past when I thought he was being unrealistic. At the time of the Timothy McVea bombing in Oklahoma a few years ago, for instance, I was sure it was “foreign” terrorists. Not so. It was “home grown,” and Rufus told me that right at the beginning.
As Kremandala is organized, I do not run this newspaper, the radio or the television. Rufus and I are not together in any organization, except for the UBAD Education Foundation (UEF), where we are board members, and the Citizens Organized for Liberty through Action (COLA), of which we are members. I am not responsible for Rufus X, is what I am saying. If I am to be indicted because he is my brother and friend for 40 years and more, then so let it be.
All power to the people.