by Colin Hyde
It was perplexing when Mr. S. Elrington entered the 2020 UDP race for leadership after John Saldivar had been forced to step down. Was he serious; was it his way of expressing his disappointment in the two candidates, John and Patrick Faber; was he trying to sway the election by taking votes from one of the candidates; or, or, yes, was he serious?
On the first and that last, at the time of the convention Sedi was already a relatively old soul. Hmm, but Joe Biden and Donald Trump actually led/lead the world at a more ancient age, so maybe it wasn’t so outlandish for an old Sedi Elrington to take up the reins here. But wait, it couldn’t have been that he was serious, because he had already intimated that he was stepping out of electoral politics.
Well, now we have the hair from the haas tail in our hands. Mr. Sedi got dusted off badly in that UDP convention for leadership — 286 votes going to the winner, Faber; 267 going to Saldivar, and 10 to Mr. Elrington. But he was serious, and the proof of that has been laid before us since.
After getting blown out in that convention, and making it official that he wouldn’t contest the 2020 general elections for his party, which had given him a ministership for 13 years, Sedi went to the House and pounded the governments he served from 2008 to 2020, for failure to deliver for the people on the south side of Belize City. And out of government and party, his nose is still deep in the country’s political affairs and economic life. He’s a regular in the Reporter, in a column in which he says terrible things about the present government, said equally bad things about the judiciary, and lavishes praise on M. Ashcroft, Belize’s number one campaign donor.
To know a man you have to check out their past deeds and pronouncements. It’s easy with Mr. Sedi, because he never hid his hand. Sedi claims to have marched with PSWG against the 17 proposals. While a civilian, he coldly commented regarding a battle between the church and the gamblers that the winner would be the one that showed the most tenacity. He’s a known Singaporean, but this corner hasn’t heard a comment from him about use of the tambran whip. He insisted on the technical description of our western border, and said that our fisherfolk in the south wouldn’t know where that one was. He said he quit doing murder cases because he never lost one. As minister, he supported Preventative Detention (I believe it was his baby), opined that a foreign police commissioner mightn’t be a bad thing, brought Israeli intelligence to Belize and had Israelis train our police, and of course, of course he was the one to rush off and sign the compromis.
In at least one of his columns, he lambasted the judiciary. He said that in his day judges for the most part “were knowledgeable … respectful and scrupulously and patently fair … so fair that one could confidently predict the outcome of a case”, but that “that is no longer the case …” This assault might have been provoked by a land folios case in which he came off looking quite befuddled, and possibly lost some money.
Ouch, recently Sedi Elrington, for a second or third time, wrote and wrote and wrote about the wonders Michael Ashcroft has done since he came to Belize. Notably, not once did he mention that man’s doings when he had BTL, not once. I always smile when I see the Reporter disclaimer on every column, no matter how benign. But then I think, if you have an, ehm, wild columnist like Sedi Elrington, you have to protect yourself at all times.
Okay, returning to that leadership thing, we must blame ourselves for not seeing that he was after the big prize, not about running foil. We should have recognized that a man as opinionated as he is, even if wildly so, would want more than being “a” minister in government. Maybe all’s well that ends well, that the UDP didn’t even consider him. But, but Joe Biden and Donald Trump, two geezers who can’t tie their shoelaces, one is president and vying for more, and the other hasn’t given up on getting his hands back on the trigger for the bomb.
Pressuring Jamaica?
US Vice President, Mrs. Kamala Harris, has Jamaican ancestry, so that island was quite happy when their granddaughter made it so high in the US government. I don’t know if any plums have been thrown Jamaica’s way since Kamala’s stunning and exciting accession to a big office in the most powerful house in the world, but last week Jamaicans might have been very unhappy that they had celebrated. The story goes that the US wanted Jamaica to give diplomatic immunity to the same-sex spouse of a US diplomat, and Jamaica balked. Okay, I don’t know if it is that much of a row, but all indications are that there was some tension, strained relations.
Jamaica, like the Catholic Church, like the Christian Evangelicals, like the Muslims, like the Bahá’ís, and like many others, does not bless gay marriage. Kamala is pro-LGBT, and US president, Joe Biden endorsed rice throwing on their heads in 2012. There are Belizeans who supported the Donald Trump candidacy in the last US presidential election largely because they feared that Biden would try and shove gay marriage down our throats.
Akaading to story, Biden was in high school when his dad told him gay marriage was a good thing. A good guess is he was about 15 at that time, and another good guess puts him at about 85 now, so if we’re talking 2012, it took him nearly 60 years to process his dad’s counsel and come out for a man and a man walking down the aisle. The Americans being far more enlightened than we are, rightly what we should be looking at here, and in Jamaica is at least a 100-year moratorium.
Hn, just last week, ehm, notorious local gay liberator, Caleb Orosco, was feted by US ambassador to Belize, Ms. Michelle Kwan. Breaking News reporter, Zoila Palma Gonzalez, described Mr. Caleb as a “human rights advocate”, and said Ms. Kwan congratulated him on his work to advance LGBT rights, and said it is good for democracy.
The US and the Europeans are running way too fast with this thing. It is good that homosexuals today don’t have to be ashamed of their feelings, and yes, people like Caleb deserve some credit for that. But people just have this terrible habit of being too aggressive. Gay marriage is an extremely strange animal, the strangest of animals. Ah, once upon a time that cake belonged to oldsters. Ha, ha, old men and old women tying the knot; outsiders all know on the sexual account that’s trivia, nothing can come of it, if they can. Okay, you don’t have to tell me to cut off here.
Rossana sends Johnny on vacation
Congratulations and thank you to Mrs. Rossana Briceño for sending J. Briceño on a jaunt, out of the country, for two weeks. I bet malicious sorts are saying it’s his Cabinet friends who asked him to just go somewhere for a while, but you know me, I give no encouragement to sinister kinds. I tell you, no one thought John B could top, or is it stumble any worse than, his panades speech, the one in which he said if the neighbor’s shop had tastier panades than the ones his ma sold at her shop, well bye, bye, adíos to mom’s panades.
It’s the way of the world; nobody brings all the goods. Belize once had a PM who spoke eloquently, man, and he prided himself about it. There’s no greater accolade in that former PM’s world than to be called, Shakespearean. That PM had all the material trappings, and a bucket of clichés – damned his opponents as whitéd sepulchers; teased them that one should trust the Almighty, yes, but not forget to tie their camel; and rolled out phrases like a snowball had a better chance in hell, and on and on and on.
Man, he was sophisticated. He didn’t scream “dirty rattn teef” at his colleagues when he caught them red-handed doing the country wrong. He just threw up his arms and pleaded, “For God’s sake, stop it!”
Unfortunately, Mr. Eloquent lost all our cases and wasted much of our cash. Hubert noted his humongous fault, but bah, the others in his party said of him, that hihn ku taak!
Dis ya one, Wave’s Fonso noh di lai when ih seh that ih speech noh up to par with the predecessor. But, despite his being condemned for choosing the neighbor’s panades and being under scrutiny for calling out Mr. Juratowitch because he didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear, all the reports say the economy is recovering nicely under his leadership.