MINISTER DEREK AIKMAN & BELIZEANS UNITED FOR EQUAL RIGHTS AT HOME & THE DIASPORA (BUFERHD)!
Isn’t it funny how times slips away? It seems like just yesterday that the young and ambitious political student activist, Derek Aikman, at the tender age of 19, came home to Belize from school in Florida in the United States in the early 1980s, and began to pursue a very ambitious career in politics in Belize.
His youthful age never seemed to have mattered as Belizean young people of all colors and creed began to identify with his message of political change in a People’s United Party (PUP) dominance of political power in Belize since the 1950s under the charismatic leadership of George Cadle Price. But Derek Aikman, who may have never really envisioned that he would have come to defeat the most popular Belizean politician in history, George Price, in the historical 1984 general elections, surged into Belize’s political arena and made history for himself.
Aikman’s alliance with Belize’s opposition party at that time, the United Democratic Party (UDP), that appeared to have connected him traditionally through the political leanings of his parents, immediately embraced his astute political ambitions to enlarge their cadre of talented Belizean politicians that included Belize’s present Prime Minister, Dean Oliver Barrow, who had stood in relative brilliance to emerging Aikman. Barrow appeared to have not only become a serious competitor and challenge to the ambitious Aikman, but he had already established himself within the party’s hierarchy, and would later pose some serious threat to the upward mobility of Belize’s most fast rising politician, Derek Aikman.
The two promising UDP politicians became the prize of the UDP party and paralleled each other in oratory skills to the envy of most of the veteran politicians at the time. Their only match from across Belize’s vibrant political spectrum was the PUP’s Assad Shoman and Said Musa. The stage for the 1984 general election battle was set, and the Belizean people had begun to become disgruntled and frustrated with the PUP’s failed electoral promises and change could be felt to the point of absolute certainty.
In the first ever United Democratic Party (UDP) political victory since their disappointing loss in 1979, and the first ever People’s United Party (PUP) loss in history, Aikman went on to beat the incumbent and longstanding Prime Minister, George Price, in Belize City’s Pickstock Division in the 1984 general elections. He went on to become Belize’s Minister of Education capitalizing on much earned political capital to spend; and spend it he did with his ambitious plans in the initiating of Belize’s first ever university, called “University College of Belize (UCB)” that copied the U.S. Ferris State University’s curriculum and design almost completely. Minister Aikman had made his first political move as a young and ambitious Belizean politician who was coming of age under the watchful eyes of international political observers.
After a long absence from politics in Belize, enduring some painful political and financial losses in the 1980s and 90s, the formidable former UDP politician, Derek Aikman, has made a sudden resurgence in Belize’s political arena with his recently founded “Belizeans United for Equal Rights at Home & Abroad” (BUFERHD). It appears that the political and civic organization is championing the constitutional rights of the Belizean electorate that has been corrupted by many terms in power of past and present governments of Belize, including Aikman’s once aligned UDP party that has won three consecutive elections already since 2008, adding to the two times before that in 1984 and 1993.
BUFERHD’s recent political stint and bombshell was the revelation that the Belize electoral ballot is not, and was not really “secret” at all. In a special meeting called by the political organization’s head himself, the battle scarred and resistant Derek Aikman surprised many Belizean political pundits by seeking to prove that the two Belize political parties in the country’s two party political system had appeared to have been cheating the Belizean electorate all the while: what should have been a secret ballot that was supposed to have been kept confidential was suspect.
Through Minister Aikman’s assertions, it was not necessarily so. Did most Belizean politicians and campaign managers of Belize’s political parties know such a thing was going on in Belize’s proud electoral system that some, like U.S. President Jimmy Carter, had held up to high standards to the rest of the Western world as a beacon of light symbolic of free and fair elections? Or is BUFERHD’s call here just a political ploy to get the attention of the Belizean political electorate at home and abroad to earn badly needed political capital to later enter Belize’s partisan politics in the next general elections with the former Minister Aikman at the helm!
(Photo courtesy of the Belize government, “Belize Today Magazine,” in 1987)