(This column was first published in the Amandala issue of Friday, May 5, 1995)
…Shell Game… Hickory Dickory Dock…
Eugene O’Neill, regarded as the best American playwright, once remarked that “life is an illusion; man must live a lie.” This sentiment may aptly be applied to those who hold out hope to the youth of Belize, promising a better quality of life than their parents are now experiencing.
“The youths are our future leaders”; “they are the citizens of tomorrow” are among the many clichés constantly repeated by our politicians, religious leaders, social workers, et alii, to give the “apparency” that they are really serious.
Children’s Week, the Year of the Child, International Youth Day are declared and celebrated to reinforce this “seriousness”. Local pundits and international experts and advisers are co-opted to present their programs on radio and television talk shows (newspaper articles). Seminars are held to tell us how to achieve a higher standard of living.
The international expert arrives, lives amongst us for a few weeks or months, listens to his host, and only occasionally the people, digests what he has gleaned, mixes it with his cultural experience, and then regurgitates it in unintelligible jargonese, collects his fees and departs. The contributions of the local expert are best summed up as “words, words full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
The mouse ran up the clock…
We perpetuate illusions and live a lie. The young man/woman who wishes to start a business of whatever sort, who wishes to become financially self-sufficient, must run the gauntlet of:
1. Getting a loan from the branch bank of 14-16% for 3 to 5 years after filling out a demeaning and humiliating questionnaire.
2. Paying office rent.
3. Government requiring him to pay: (a) trade licence fee (b) and contributions 6 times the amount of employee(s) deposit to the Social Security Bank (c) Customs duty (d) and administer the P.A.Y.E. for his employee(s) (income tax).
4. Deposit taxes to BTL, BEL, WASA, and hope there will be no blackouts, that there will be water in the tap (Incidentally as “drought” is about, when was the last time the Belize River ran dry?), that he will not have to make 3 or 4 more calls to get his party.
5. That officialdom will not suddenly grant a permit to subvert him, nor spring a new tax to muck up his budget.
The clock struck one…
A review of the above protocol will reveal that the branch bank is usurious; in no way is this sufficient time to sustain your business; you will go broke, the branch bank will foreclose, repeat the process and continue to feed off the aspirations of another. You are in the hole from the word “go.” The various taxes and regulations imposed by officialdom will cover the hole. One would suggest that the energy spent on propagating non-solutions under the cover of “jargonese” could better be expended on repealing or reforming the present codes written (and unwritten).
We can begin by:
1. Legislating the National Workers Bank to lend risk (venture) capital at 4% for 12 years (internal foreign aid).
2. Decrease the trade licence tax to 10%
3. Decrease his contributions to the Social Security Bank by 50%.
4. Decrease the Customs duty by 50% (a more productive, efficient tax system would be to replace all taxes with a national sales tax of 8 to 10% – Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana agrees.
Implementation of these or variations thereof will be the best indicators that they are really sincere about your welfare.
Instead of bringing foreign experts to tell us nothing, pay them to lobby in their own countries for fair trade of the few productive exports (witness the banana war now going on). The local expert should cease rationalizing the irrationalities of their employers (foreign and local) and apologizing for their non-policies and instead come up with ideas of how we can get the portfolios from “mother country” to collateralize the National Bank.
The mouse ran down…
Then the Lord said to Abraham there are terrible accusations against Sodom and Gomorrah… Abraham approached the Lord and asked, “Are you really going to destroy the innocent with the guilty? If there are fifty innocent people in the city, will you destroy the whole city…if I find 30 innocent people… I will spare the whole city … Twenty?…Ten?… I will not destroy it if there are only ten. After he had finished speaking with Abraham the Lord went away and Abraham returned home.
Hickory dickory dock…
Would that the Lord would come amongst us and raise up 10 innocents to disprove the cynicism of O’Neill, that this need not be forever true; that he would imbue them with the wisdom to formulate development strategies in the best interests of the Belizean youth. If by His grace, they can then accomplish this, we can in truth say to our youth, we are leaving you a legacy of hope, for we have laid for you a foundation that will enable you to plant and to enjoy the fruits of your labour.
Dickory dock…