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The day after the next general election …

FeaturesThe day after the next general election …

… it will be in my mind to apply for a UDP party card. I most likely won’t. I’ll want to; I might; but I most likely won’t. I’m far more comfortable with the Reds than the Blues, but if I put in for a party card ih noh wahn be no welcome home to no prodigal.

What I am sure of is that if I still have paper and ink, I will be a fierce critic of the PUP, if dehn win, frahn day one. I don’t believe in any party hanging around for more than one term. Get in, get the job done, and then get out and go remake yuself.

For democracy’s sake alone, I expect the PUP to win the next general election. If it’s solely about performance, the UDP got windfall from oil from two countries (Belize and Venezuela), which they used on a number of projects, but there was too much squandering or snatching of the people’s money. The UDP has been woeful on crime, they have done next to nothing to improve our democracy, and they have failed in many other areas. So, dehn fu goh.

The UDP can win, of course. They shouldn’t roll over. The PUP should be forced to earn the title. The PUP can do that by cementing in stone that if we put them back in office they will introduce all the necessary reforms that we believe will improve Belize.

God spare life, if the PUP do win, and they are unable to change their dirty spots, and if the UDP is unable to find a very serious candidate who we can trust will fight for the changes we need in this country, guess who could be on the Red ticket facing down Julius in 20 whatever… Don’t buy everything people tell you about anybody. Give everybody a chance so that they can tell their entire story. People can surprise you sometimes. Hmm.

There are situations in life when one just has to satta, but in leadership there is no space for wasting time. When a person gets elected to government they should feel so honored to serve they become like Churchill. No sleep. For five years (it should be four) they should be burning the candle at both ends to effect the changes that will make life better for the people who elected them.

Voila, night and day jamming doubles the speed of the train. In five years (it should be four) good leaders should accomplish for the people what lazy or corrupt leaders would take ten or fifteen years (or more) to do. Don’t let anybody get away with any story that Rome wasn’t built in a day. Tell them, yes, but no one said it couldn’t have been built in half the time.

Dean Barrow mos bi mi tink hihn da ih Ongkl Dohgi

I’ve never been an Oliver Smalls, Bishop Wright, or Reverend Gough, but even though I’m not a major league crooner, I love to sing a little of the old church songs after I’m done reading my passages in the morning. I generally can hold my own between re and fa on the regular octave. I had a little more range than that, not much, but I lost it a long time ago because I didn’t cherish the little I had. We can leave that alone and just stick with the facts. I’m now a re-mi-fa man, that’s my repertoire. Yap, I can show myself some between those three notes.

Aha, while I’m singing the other morning I was reminded of my singing for my old mom a couple months ago, and a little story that provoked. I sing for my mom and I recite poetry from a book or from the phone thing, for my dad. My old dad is 96 and he can still recite some poems without the notes. He bragged to me once that the longest poem he knew by heart had 35 verses. I said to him, Wow, you were up there.

Yaa, that’s impressive. I’ve told you already I was never Mr. Studious, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t respect the Shakespearites, and all their sort. Hooray for them, they have their game. In his younger days my dad wouldn’t have tolerated a slouch like me reading poems for him, but these days he can’t be too pohtikla. He’s blind, and so he has to appreciate any morsels that come his way. I recite poetry for my dad. I sing for my mom.

One of the all-time favorite hymns for Methodists (my mom’s a Methodist) is, “Trust and Obey”, by John Sammis, and that day, after I’d finished belting out that special for my mom, my dad says: “Do you know how Dohgi Barrow used to sing that song?” “No,” I say, “Tell mi.” My dad clears his voice, then he starts to sing: “Trust and don’t pay, for there’s no other way…”

My dad said he recalls the PM’s grandfather having four sons: the PM’s dad, Artie, the pharmacist; the immortal poet, Ray; one son who died in a tragic drowning; and Dohgi (Douglas), the beautiful character. Hmm, every family has a mischievous boy.

The moral of this story – yes, already – is that elders must be careful what they say around children because children might believe them and you never know who will grow up to be PM and what hell they will bring on their nation if they feel that one can actually get away without pay. Oh what a humongous debt that Barrow is leaving behind. It will take some crazy kind of genius to wiggle us out of this latest Super Bond.

When you look at how Dean Barrow (of the All About Trust UDP) has managed our economy, you have to think he is either a dirty rotten crook, as the PUP say, or he really believed that we could trust and don’t pay. On the innocent side, the way he dreamed this thing, we would win all our cases in the courts (we didn’t), and we would build structures reaching to the skies and budget-busting roads at suspect cost, and no need to worry, when the time came to pay, we wouldn’t.

One mind like that in the House is one too many and we have to ask what God was thinking for poor Belize when we got Godwin too. Remember how philistines at the Wave ripped into Godwin because he was finding virtue in a businessman they thought had PUP leanings? Well, that wasn’t his first sin of that kind. Sometime before that he defended one of the worst PUP sinners ever, a gentleman named Luke Espat.

Luke was on KREM Radio one morning, a guest on Godwin’s Show, and in defense of all the debt Belize was racking up to fund his projects, Luke told us that people oanli stone mango tree weh di bayr gud fruit. Godwin, in his big money support for the great developer/crony/PUP supporter, said that Belizeans shouldn’t be sweating so much about debt because if we put the money into roads and bridges we would develop the country. Aha, and if we had difficulty paying, well, the lenders could come for our heads, but they couldn’t take away the roads and the bridges.

Oh no, I didn’t have any quarrel with roads and bridges then, and I don’t have any now. Godwin’s DNA then, I believe, was that we should get value for money, but he should have insisted that those roads and bridges be productive because you know those lender bohgaz are not going to forgive what we borrow. They are going to make us pay, through our nose.

Bah, we lost all the cases, and oh the cost! And we are saddled with numerous extravagant loans. It’s a heavy load, and there are suggestions from the PUP, if we can believe anything from them, that PM Barrow won’t lift a finger to help ease our pain when his tenure ends next year.

The PUP say that we won’t be getting any taxes off any Barrow finances to help us through the dark days ahead, because the day he leaves the House he’ll be on a jet plane to what they refer to as his new home and bank in that place where they say he went to cook up the secret mammoth BTL deal with Ashcroft – in Miami.

Poor Belize, we won’t be singing “Praise the Lord (we) see the light” after Barrow gets the boot. Instead, poor Belize, we’ll be groaning, and all because PM Barrow really thought he was Dohgi, so we could trust and …

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