Marion Ali: “You’re going up against a giant…”

Evan ‘Mose’ Hyde: “No, no. We noh deh gainst wah giant. Wah giant deh gainst di real giant; the people ah Belize da di sleeping giant. Dat da di real giant.” — News5, June 18, 2008.

The last 13 years of my life as a citizen of Belize have been defined by the political directorate of the United Democratic Party; that’s half of my lifetime. The teachers I got, the transport system I used, the education I had access to, the streets and playgrounds I used, have been defined by the action or lack thereof of that political party. You must understand that for me, a writer, as someone with an opinion who dares to share it, the space of partisan political victimization is not new. I have been scorched where it matters most by certain personalities of one side and, by default, have been branded as the next. For me, though, it has never been that black and white or, in this case, blue and red. At 24, I have never voted in a general election, and while the Representation of the People’s act allows that Belizeans abroad may vote, there was no mechanism to support it, and thus I could not participate in one of Belize’s most historic elections since her theoretical independence.

I am ever and incredibly curious about the civil unrest of the early 2000s, the G7 which included persons who now are the most powerful ministers in the People’s United Party Cabinet, including the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister. I am also very much in tune with what is called internal party politics of leaderships, intra-party constitutions, and conventions, because these people in our first-past-the-post electoral system will eventually become people on ballots that you and I must choose from. I remember keenly monitoring the leadership turmoil of the People’s United Party after the resignation of Rt. Hon. Said Musa after their 2008 clobbering at the polls, where the dust settled some 8 years later after resignations, leadership conventions, and election losses with the win of Hon. Johnny Briceño in January of 2016. I suppose it is hard to believe that an 11-year-old was in tune with these events, but I was. In fact, I remember 2016 rather clearly. Now I get to watch the rough waters the Faber 5 and Company must tread through in the era of social media, where it seems like the power plays for the top seat are seemingly always taking place, even after conventions. I suppose I can remember these things because elections are historical markers for us Belizean people, and what 2008 and 2020 are screaming at us is that succession planning and healthy political leadership are on life support. It seems that when the leadership of a political party is in peril, they, in contemporary Belizean history, “tek lick” in the elections that loom near. The PUP won only 6 seats in 2008, and the UDP took almost 5 in 2020.

The Caribbean Development Bank is currently hosting its 51st Annual Meeting under the theme, “Innovation, Transformation and Sustainable Development”. On June 15th the William G. Demas Memorial Lecture was hosted with special guest Professor Mariana Mazzucato, who made several salient points during her lecture and in answering questions, so if my readers have some time to listen to that, I highly recommend it. My favorite point was that the public sector is being run as an inefficient private sector or, more accurately, has managed to augment and scale up some of the darker sides of private sector management and has made it the standard modus operandi.

We have defaulted to operating from the premise of parasitic extraction and pivoting away from conscious and symbiotic investment in human capital. We have veered away from a kumbaya around innovation, creativity, and smart risk-taking and have bet against ourselves for the benefit of nefarious investors. This has, across generations of political leadership, been our way of thinking, been the trademark of our low-energy democracy. So while my hope is to be optimistic about this still very new People’s United Party government because their success is mine, our success, my lived history has shown me that it can very quickly begin to look a lot like 2008. A place and time where the honeymoon is sweet, but the marriage is strained, and the divorce is almost annihilating. I’ve never been married, and I do not think it’s in my cards, but what I do know is that it is a contract that involves a great deal of risk-taking, but also learning. Risks involve failure, but we cannot be failing on the replay. As uncomfortable as it sounds, we must fail forward.

So, while the Sleeping Giant is being reported to have woken up, with billowing smoke and smoldering rock, the Belizean people must do the same. I do not want for us to be blowing in the cassette, rolling back the tape to play Marvin Gaye’s ‘Mercy, Mercy Me.’ I hope that when I am 36, another young writer, in the country’s most prolific newspaper, gets to write a different story.

Stay Curious.