by Marie-Therese Belisle Nweke
Wednesday, December 11, 2024
To some extent, all this exists right in Belize. One hears or reads of X’s, Y’s or Z’s children’s, siblings’ or wife’s academic/ professional successes in Belize. Wonderful! However, if you look very closely, they were all predicated on and fed by multi-dimensional scholarships, cronyism, prebendalism, and other kinds of cloak ‘n dagger patronage, denied to hundreds of other Belizeans, not born with a silver spoon or having fairy-like godparents.
The year I got a Canadian government scholarship in Belize, none of us who obtained that scholarship flew to Canada that year. This is because we all lost our scholarships. Why for the first time was no British Honduran student able to gain from the largesse of the Canadian government?
This was because a female silver-spooner also had been offered a Canadian government scholarship, despite her having at that point just one solitary “A” Level. And she was awaiting results for a second one, which was the minimum entry requirement to a Canadian university. So, the rest of us who were more than qualified (most of us had three “A” levels) had our Canadian university applications put on hold until her one “A” Level result came out. Well, that year the results were unusually late, and by the time the sycophantic Ministry of Education sent everything to Canada, university places there were no longer available, as the closing date had gone.
The following year, when another stunt about scholarships in connection with another silver spooner was being played, I went to see Fred Hunter, who was in charge of scholarships that year. He was an old fart, who, on sighting this young, Black Creole upstart demanding fair play from a “would-be-white” Belizean, was of no use. I must have been 18 at the time.
Then I remembered that Lindy Rogers, way back before he entered politics, used to play cards and chase after women with my handsome, womanizing, eldest brother, Bob, who had emigrated to Chicago around 1960. So, I went to Rogers for help; and he was not merely sympathetic, but highly impressed with my determination to get the hell out of Belize in order to obtain a better education. He wasn’t bothered that my family was not PUP, or that I used to campaign for Colville Young, going from house to house, soliciting votes, when they were both facing each other in the Mesopotamia electoral division.
He literally moved heaven and earth to ensure I was able to obtain another scholarship—which this time was from the British government—and that no silver spooner would stand in my way to mess me up. Lindy Rogers became like an honorary uncle to me after that, and he was subsequently very helpful and kind to my husband. Later, when he became Belize’s ambassador to the UN (by that time I was in Nigeria), he was very kind to my aged mother; and instead of her travelling from Long Island to Manhattan to sign a key document at the Belizean embassy, he had it brought to her home by an embassy official.
Belize is much too small and incestuous for all the rubbish being practiced by this circle of the charmed few.
http://opr.news/5ebcad82241210en_ng?link=1&client=iosnews