An extraordinary sequence of events was caught on the television news cameras in the House of Representatives on Friday. The cameras showed senior law and political colleagues, former PUP Minister Said Musa and present UDP Prime Minister Dean Barrow, chatting in a leisurely and friendly manner before the House proceedings began. Later, on the adjournment, Mr. Musa, who is not the Leader or even Deputy Leader of the Opposition PUP, rose to make a serious, even pretentious, statement about Belize’s present financial and economic woes. He was entitled to make such a statement, as area representative for the Fort George constituency and perhaps as former Prime Minister, but the protocol was not right. Because of its gravity, such a statement belonged, properly, to the Hon. Leader of the Opposition. Prime Minister Barrow then tore Mr. Musa to pieces, humiliating him with a story of an Ashcroft Christmas party where the British Lord had taken Mr. Musa to task and berated him in front of guests. This was during Mr. Musa’s tenure as Prime Minister.
We were embarrassed for Mr. Musa, because he is our contemporary, and because he was our friend, sometimes partner, for decades. The question is: where is he going with this apparent comeback attempt?
There are people in Mr. Musa’s circle of family and friends who are no doubt pushing him in this comeback experiment. They fear that Mr. Briceño will bungle a PUP opportunity to return to office in 2013. They believe that the two-party system in Belize is so predictable, that the electorate will be severely tempted to return to the PUP three years from now. So, they reason, why not Said?
Well, we’ll tell them why not Said. In the first instance, he has had his run – almost ten round years as Prime Minister. In Mexico, and we like the Mexican way in this, they give you one term – six years and get out of there. In the second instance, Mr. Musa has “baggage.” And in the third instance, were Mr. Musa to return to PUP leadership, he would be missing a vital credibility he enjoyed in his glory years. That credibility is this newspaper’s.
There are people around Mr. Musa who are so angry with Amandala that their judgement is clouded. They have almost convinced Said that, were it not for the “ingratitude/treachery” of G-7 and the “ingratitude/treachery” of Amandala, happy days would still be here for himself and the dear old party. As we look at it, it simply had to be that his family and his friends were inside Mr. Musa’s head, so to speak, when he exposed himself to Friday afternoon’s lashing from the Prime Minister.
Inside the party itself, there is a larger issue which is being ignored by Mr. Musa’s cheerleaders. It is the issue of Mr. Price and the Price family within the PUP reality. There was a People’s United Party before Mr. Price took it over in 1956. But by the time Mr. Price was replaced in 1996, forty years later, there were many people who could not conceive of a PUP without him. It may have been that amongst those many people was Said Musa himself, the new Leader elected in 1996.
There is a powerful and vocal faction in the PUP which has been warning of a supposed Kremandala danger. It is more and more appearing to be the case that the faction in question features prominent members of the Price family. We have noted before in these pages that the PUP has not won a single general election, including and since 1979, wherein Amandala campaigned against them. Why this is so, has to do with a history which goes back several decades. It appears that there is something lacking in the PUP which is provided by Partridge Street. Those who are spreading the Kremandala phobia believe that the PUP is a self-contained party, that it is the monolith they remember when Uncle George was in his glory days.
But, things are no longer the way they used to be. The statistical indications of a paradigm change in Belizean politics first surfaced in the general elections of 1974. The answers are in the numbers. The Price family faction, however, is vastly more interested in myth than in numbers.
Mr. Musa should know better than they do. But, he is loyal to the family. That is why he placed himself in the jeopardy he did on Friday afternoon. Loyalty is a praiseworthy virtue. Politicians, however, have to balance loyalty with good sense.
Thus, endeth the lesson.