Former PUP Leader and Prime Minister, Rt. Hon. Said Musa, had gone all out in support of attorney Lisa Shoman in her campaign to become the Belmopan constituency standard bearer. This was not your ordinary constituency campaign. The Musa/Fonseca newspaper had been touting Ms. Shoman as a PUP leadership candidate for a long time, even when Lisa had no organizational credentials apart from her confidence and proven abilities. Fundamentally, Lisa Shoman did not have a constituency, and you can’t go far in party politics if you don’t have one.
Ralph Fonseca had found this out after he entered Cabinet through the Senate after the PUP returned to office in September of 1989. Fonseca had not competed as a candidate in the 1989 general elections, probably because of the scars from his massive defeat by Dean Barrow in a 1989 Queen’s Square run. In 1989, Ralph soon figured that he simply had to have a division, and so Dolores Balderamos Garcia was persuaded by then Party Leader, Rt. Hon. George Price, and Hon. Said Musa, to withdraw from her campaigning for the proposed, new Belize Rural Central constituency. Dolores made way for Ralph. A story now goes with this, for when the PUP’s Rural Central convention is held in Ladyville on Sunday, June 19, Dolores will be there, but Ralph will not.
Our story today, however, is not about Ralph, although you may say this story is about his and Said’s “old guard.” Remember, after Musa resigned the party leadership following the PUP’s disgraceful performance in the February 2008 general elections, the Musa/Ralph old guard attempted to sneak in a “second generation old guard,” Francis Fonseca, as PUP Leader, but Francis was defeated by Johnny Briceño in March of 2008. Said Musa is nothing if he is not tenacious, so that his newspaper quickly began pushing Lisa Shoman as a PUP leadership candidate, at a time when the Musa/Fonseca newspaper was doing a weekly hatchet job on Hon. Johnny, and other people.
At some point in 2009 or 2010, a Lisa Shoman trial balloon began to float in Joe Coye’s Caribbean Shores. This was a strange situation, because Coye was a Said Musa supporter, and PUP insiders knew Lisa was Said’s candidate. We can’t say when and why it was decided to have Lisa go west to Belmopan, but at that time there was only the former Police Assistant Commissioner, Maureen Leslie, toiling there for the PUP. Again, we can’t say when it was exactly that Dr. Amin Hegar came on the Belmopan scene, but the fact of the matter is that the good doctor upset the Musa/Shoman applecart on Sunday.
Dr. Hegar had represented Cayo West between 1993 and 1998, when the PUP was in Opposition, but in the 1998 general elections when the PUP reclaimed national power, Dr. Amin was narrowly defeated in Cayo West by the UDP’s Erwin Contreras.
Some months ago, there was talk in the PUP that Musa/Shoman were seeking to have Mrs. Leslie withdraw her Belmopan candidacy, but it was around the same time that Dr. Hegar came through on the rail, to use the parlance of the race track.
The old guard are no fools. Realizing that Dr. Hegar was big trouble, they attempted to have him “disqualified” from candidacy last Wednesday through intervention by the PUP’s national executive. When that failed, Mr. Musa himself took charge of the Lisa Shoman campaign. From Friday through Sunday, the former Party Leader was in Belmopan campaigning for Lisa.
The significance of the fact that Dr. Hegar won by a fairly large margin lies in its effect on the PUP’s philosophical direction. Dr. Hegar’s victory is a big defeat for the old guard, whose policies dominated the PUP during their two terms of office between 1998 and 2008 when Mr. Musa was Prime Minister.
Between 1998 and 2004, the PUP, with Ralph Fonseca totally in control of Belize’s public finances, practiced something Musa and Fonseca called “growth economics.” The rest of us have different names for that period, but the important thing is that that eventually there was a challenge to Ralph’s public finances domain, and it came from within the PUP Cabinet in August of 2004.
The so-called G-7 was a challenge to old guard rule in the PUP. In response, Mr. Musa made some relevant adjustments, adjustments which probably saved Belize’s public finances from possible default. Said/Ralph loyalists argue, however, that G-7, not growth economics, caused the PUP to begin losing elections in 2006. This is the power struggle which has been wracking the PUP where public finances philosophy is concerned. Now, Lisa has lost, and the word is that Ralph will not contest the Belize Rural Central constituency convention. The implications for Mr. Musa’s political future are substantial.