It seems like the stories around the Coronavirus have taken over our lives, but while it is critical because it is a life and death issue, even more critical to me is the economic hardship we will suffer at the hands of our failed government and poor governance.
Knowing that we cannot afford to cope with any massive COVID-19 infections due to a poor healthcare system and a poor economy, as soon as I understood the fallout COVID-19 had caused in other countries I applied the metric to Belize and knew an early response could be our saving grace. Things like these make my brains go into solution mode as if by nature —hence my public call on 23rd March for key steps to be taken. These being a: 1. Declaration of State of Emergency; 2. Three-month moratorium on payment of utility bills, 3. Moratorium at the banks for at least three months; 4. taking stocks of our local food production and our food importation; and 5. relief programs for the poor and financially affected, amongst other things.
The reality we are dealing with here is that I, like our leaders and some of you, knew we had really poor people in this country long before COVID-19. We say some 44% of people in Belize live below the poverty line. They may be working full-time or even hustling, but the fact that they are earning money does not mean they are NOT poor! It is even more serious that one can be working fulltime and still remain below the poverty line. This to me is an indication of a high cost of living, a very low minimum wage, which is not a living wage, and unfair distribution of resources. In my belief, these indicators can easily be changed, if we had the political will.
Poor governance
Based on my observation, there has not been such political will in our political machinery since our independence in 1981. Further, my observation of our laws and rules of governance is that they are designed to avoid accountability and transparency, which are the hallmark of good governance. It is appalling for me to accept that in the past decade alone, we have seen some of the most scandalous conduct from our politically elected leaders and NOT one has had to face the wrath of the legal system, much less been investigated and arrested for the misfeasance and embezzlement of our money.
When the Auditor General did an audit of our Immigration and Nationality Department and discovered the illegalities taking place there in terms of issuances of visas and passports, not one public official or politician got arrested and charged. Instead, there was a Senate inquiry, which resulted in naught, and to date we do not even have the official report with any recommendations. The outcry of the people has been but a whimper, and the partisan political divide has resulted in the voters, the very 44% under the poverty line, actually defending the party that gives them the pantry, the Boost and the $50 dollars for a vote come election. They sell their souls for they seek immediate self-reward and gratification and are not attuned to the idea of building towards a greater collective good. Poverty has a way of blinding us, and politicians thrive on that! That is the pathetic type of society we have become.
Then let us not forget the reason Minister Gaspar Vega had to step aside from his ministerial portfolio, although he still collects a minister’s wage, but with no need to attend House meetings. The scandals involving land transactions and the “hot bed of corruption,” as Dean Barrow called it, were many, but the anvil that wrecked the proverbial camel’s back was surely knowing he signed land documents from which his son benefited in the value of $400,000.00 in one land deal. Monies he refuses to return to our coffers!
Then, more recently, it has been John Saldivar who lied and repeatedly lied through his teeth that he was not involved or knew of any money received by any minister of government from American fraudster Lev Dermin and his accomplice Jacob Kingston. He adamantly denied it was him, until the undeniable evidence of him getting monthly tranches of US$25,000.00 was revealed as part of the case in the Utah Court. He then actually went on national TV to explain it away, but by then, it had already cost him the leadership of the UDP. However, he had the audacity to say he deserves to put his name back in the race for the new leadership convention… just a repeat of the same crap. That is with how much disrespect he sees his supporters and electorate, and they in turn accept such conduct and would jump up and rally behind him still! At the end of the day it is the Belizean people who have remained overwhelmingly accepting of his lies and inability to account to date as to how he managed to get those monies into the country. The evidence is that at least for two months he got US$25,000.00, but he is yet to say for how many months that was going on. But that sum alone is Bz $100,000.00, which is far above the allowed Bz$10,000.00 that can be brought into the country without declaring it to the customs officials at any port of entry. To date no results from a purported police investigation can answer that, and sadly the Financial Intelligence Unit had failed miserably in their investigation disclosed earlier, as the PM had said FIU did an investigation!
These are only the salient examples, since the stories of irregularities, corruption, misconduct etc. abound, and there is absolutely no retribution for these corrupt leaders. On the contrary, they remain with their names on the ballots and actually are likely to be voted into office again. Their victory at the polls says more about us the voters, than them, the scoundrels!
The poverty of accountability
COVID-19 is only highlighting how financially unprepared we are for any crisis. Truth be told, COVID-19 has NOT hit us as bad as it could have and as hard as it has hit more developed economies. It is local pressure from people that resulted in earlier actions than government had announced. Prime Minster Dean Barrow had previously said, on the advice of the DHS, that he was not going to do any shutdown until there was community spread. Of course, that was bad advice and a bad idea. He eventually yielded to public pressure, although he will not admit that. And thankfully, he, at least did a half-hearted shutdown and declared a State of Emergency on April 1, 2020. And it was not until the death of Patient #4, Hubert Pipersburgh, that he increased the quarantine provisions in San Pedro and the Cayo District. This is good news for us, since that helped to contain the two main COVID-19 clusters we now know we have in Belize.
Of course, it was not until the death of Patient #10, Conrad Everette, that PM Barrow got the real scare and passed stringent quarantine regulations countrywide, since at this time COVID-19 was at his door steps. It’s amazing that it had to hit close to home for him to get the sense of how people help this virus get around and how essential it is to stop or slow down the movement of people in order to isolate the virus so that it can be contained. It’s a basic process, but when economic interest prevailed, this reality was not considered until the second death, perhaps because he realized one of his police guards was the relative of Patient #10.
At first I personally could not understand, if the theory of isolation and containment was so elementary, why the PM and his advisers could not bring themselves to shut down business since March, except for the essential services and needs, of course! It behooved me to find out, and then the truth had to finally come out of the dark. The naked truth is that 1. Our economy is so mismanaged — as the PM said in his hifalutin language, “we bruk”! 2. With no money to spare to give relief during the crisis, they had to buy time to scramble to find funds and borrow here and there and beg everywhere, because in-house there was nothing to spare; 3. The huge businessman’s interest was not about protecting employees and consumers, but about trying to keep making money at all cost.
The only reason our treasury could be so “bruk” and our reserves depleted, is because we as a people do not hold our leaders accountable. The Opposition, no matter which party it is, only remains critical and demands changes to allow transparency and accountability, when in opposition, but as soon as they get in office they refuse to make the legislative and systemic changes to truly account for our monies. And when they do make some little change they still find some other law or ways to circumvent it.
The poverty in the very system of accountability is higher than those living under the poverty line. I say it is 90%, but since the people are just living day by day, they do not find the time to learn and understand the system of governance to appreciate that they can pressure for change and to understand it is the very same system that is used to keep them down and poor!
How the rich make money off the poor
It is no surprise that it’s the huge businessmen who finance election campaigns and in return expect to influence government policies, decisions and laws. If COVID-19 did not teach us anything else, it taught us that indeed “money talks and bullshit walks”. Who can ever forget these immortal words:
“Two doctors I spoke with this morning told me to shut the country down… but I got a call today from a big-time businessman asking me not to shut down the country.”
PM Dean O. Barrow 25-03-20
However, while we are focused on COVID-19 for now, there is more need than ever to remain vigilant, since the government is continuing to act according to its previous bad policy decisions and has legalized many an adverse decision against the people. The recent revelation by the LPG Companies that the price of butane can be reduced to give Belizeans a financial break was only unmasked after the government threatened the companies with imprisonment just for trying to give promotional rates during the COVID-19 crisis. Gladly, the population revolted in the social media forums and the government reluctantly gave the reduction and more, in an attempt to also affect the viability of the LPG Companies.
The conduct of the government is not without context. You see, the government by law has declared in mid-2019 that it is creating a monopoly company to be sole importers of LPG. This is the much vaunted National Gas Company, which has huge business names backing it and has a major foreign investor cloaked behind company names. But what is special about these huge businessmen is that they are the rich who will get richer off the backs of the poor and they will do it with the help of the vey government and prime minister who just told us we are ‘bruk’! The words the PM used was the less bitter phrase, “there is no coin of the realm”, a nice way to say we outright ‘bruk’!
However, we did not become ‘bruk’ overnight, nor as a result of COVID-19. On the contrary, COVID-19 only helped to force the PM to admit we are ‘bruk’, even after just going to the National Assembly days ago and debating a budget for which he had nothing but praise. At that time, he forgot to tell the people that “we are bruk”!
But keeping the government bruk and unable to do anything for those that need lifting out of poverty is by design. There will always be money circulating in the system, but on whose hands that money is, is another thing, since it is our political leaders who decide how it is spread around and who control the natural and economic resources of this country, and thus businessmen seek to influence that by paying for election campaigns. Who gets money and government contracts paid for by our money, how many loans and who spends the loans money and even who get tax breaks, are determined by your government! Well, under the recent monopoly legislation the government is giving up millions of dollars in taxes over the next 15 years to the National Gas Company and has not told us how we the people will be taxed to make up for that shortfall.
As it stands, the present 6 LPG importers must pay all taxes required by law. These are business taxes, exchange control taxes, environmental taxes, income tax and just any tax or fees required to be paid by the government. When those LPG companies are put out of business come the end of this month, according to the monopoly law passed by the government, all those taxes they paid as LPG importers and business will cease. Sadly, it will not be replaced by any from the monopoly company, since the National Gas Company WILL NOT PAY ANY TAXES FOR 15 YEARS!
These supposedly rich investors will make money off the poor, who need the taxes to be paid to government, so the government can provide better healthcare, education and other social services. The poor, however, will not get any tax break, since each time they spend on basic necessities, they pay, at minimum, 12.5% GST. This rich investment company with local wealthy investors gets a 15- year tax break! That is how the rich make money off the poor and your government facilitates it! More on this later!