“He (Musa) already carries the heavy burden for turning Mr. Price’s monolithic and unmatched political machine into a scrap of twisted and barely functioning parts, during his tenure.”
– from Godfrey Smith’s FLASHPOINT website under the heading “From Musa with …. Malice?”
Late last week Godfrey Smith, the attorney and former PUP Pickstock area representative, released an essay on his website which was scathing in its criticism of former PUP Leader Said Musa’s new book. Among other things, Mr. Smith writes, “To say that at the end of the 1993-1998 UDP term ‘the people felt cheated and there was growing cynicism in the land’ without admitting that at the end of the 1998-2008 term the people felt violated and there was galactic cynicism in the land contradicts any claim of objectivity.”
One thrust of Smith’s essay is totally unexpected and near sensational, because Godfrey Smith is one of Lord Ashcroft’s most high profile Belizean acolytes, and since he replaced Mark Espat in Mr. Musa’s Cabinet in late 2004, Godfrey has been a prominent member of the Musa camp, which has been described since Mr. Musa’s leadership resignation in February of 2008, as the PUP “old guard.” The essay has the effect of declaring Mr. Smith’s non-complicity in the apparent Musa campaign to recover PUP leadership from Johnny Briceño. Complicating the issue is the fact that both Briceño and Musa are Ashcroft favorites, so why would a known Ashcroft acolyte now go after Musa? It is most intriguing, really. On the face of it, it doesn’t make sense.
In any case, I am looking at Mr. Smith’s reference to “Mr. Price’s monolithic and unmatched political machine,” and I am saying to myself that the evidence suggests that the extended Price family has been exposed as counter-revolutionary, and that at least three conventions and elections in the new millennium have seen Price nieces and a nephew losing badly. In fact, the very first of these fairly unexpected losses took place in 2002 when the said Godfrey Smith mauled the Price nephew, Bobby Usher, to claim the standard bearer’s position in the Pickstock constituency.
Now the Pickstock constituency is not just any constituency. It is where the awesome Holy Redeemer Credit Union is located, and it is where HRCU, run for more than five decades by the legendary “Miss Jane” – George Price’s younger sister, dominates. In Belize’s modern political era, Mrs. Gwendolyn Lizarraga had Pickstock as her power base, easily winning the seat in three consecutive general elections, from 1961 to 1969. But when her son, Adolfo, seeking to succeed her, was almost defeated by the UDP’s Paul Rodriguez in 1974, the PUP hauled Miss Jane from behind her HRCU desk, and pushed her into Pickstock. She won the seat in 1979 and 1984. In 1984, in fact, Miss Jane was the only PUP candidate to win in the old capital. Around her in Belize City, nine PUP standard bearers fell to the UDP.
Among those to fall, stunningly, was Rt. Hon. George Price himself, to the then unknown youth, Derek Aikman, in Price’s stronghold for three decades – Freetown. The PUP, in response, retired Miss Jane, and moved Mr. Price to a “safe seat” – yes, Pickstock.
So then, It was by way of Pickstock that Mr. Price returned to parliamentary power, winning the seat in 1989, 1993, and 1998. (Aikman defended Freetown for the UDP in 1989.) When Mr. Price finally decided to retire, and the Price family proposed one of Miss Jane’s sons, Bobby, to succeed “the old man,” there were political observers like myself who thought that Godfrey Smith was presumptuous, perhaps even iconoclastic, to declare his intention to defeat Bobby. After all, compared to the Price family legacy, Smith was an unproven unknown, a “callow youth.”
One of the explanations for Godfrey Smith’s Pickstock demolition of Bobby Usher, apart from the fact that el pulpo is believed to have been Godfrey’s financier, is the street unpopularity of Mr. Price’s nephews and nieces in Belize City. The main reason for that unpopularity is roots Belizeans’ belief that second generation Price family members are stuck up, if not downright segregated. And the glaring evidence of the elitist tendencies of the Price nephews and nieces is the story of volleyball in Belize City over the last two plus decades.
Where the matter, again, of the “monolithic and unmatched political machine” is concerned, there are people in the Price family and in the PUP itself who are in denial. Mr. Smith was a boy when that “monolithic and unmatched political machine” was politically destroyed in 1984. That was the end of the so-called “peaceful, construction revolution.” We can see that in retrospect. What emerged in 1989 was a counter-revolutionary PUP, with Mr. Price as a face front. How the counter-revolutionary PUP emerged is the story which pious PUP historians do not wish to tell. There are things Godfrey Smith does not know, things which he should seek to find out. Ditto for Henry Charles.
Power to the people. Power in the struggle.