by Colin Hyde
Brother Sedi Elrington isn’t the only Belizean who sings about the virtues of Singapore, but he is one of a few who understands the steep price we must pay if we want to be like Mike, like that jewel in Asia near Malaysia. Please to get it, under its legendary president, Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore was no freedom paradise.
Hmm, I should have titled this piece, “What does Sedi think about use of the SOE?”. That 13th Amendment, there’s some tricky territory there. I don’t want to drag our former foreign minister out of retirement and expose him to any flak from these legions who would free 99 murderers to prevent a single wrong incarceration. Whoa there, anybody wants the recipe to turn a tranquil haven into one of the most murderous places on earth?
I understood there were two judgments, one judge saying that an SOE (I think in 2020) was flawed, and one judge saying it was necessary, thus it was just. The judge who said the SOE was flawed is getting all the respect. The judge who got the respect gave some financial awards to individuals who had been caught in the net. You see what we have here, why the GoB decided it must pass a law that reaches back going on five years? It appears to me that that judgment with the awards opens the door for every SOE since to be declared flawed, and that would create a field day for individuals who the police felt needed to be in a space to cool off, them and their lawyers. A few tweaks might be needed to this 13th, but I believe the government has to stick with it, at least to prevent a deluge of defeats in the court.
Now, I’m like the union president who said she carries herself so that police don’t need to look her way. I think incarceration is a horrible thing. But I don’t see Belize surviving, definitely not thriving, if we don’t check mayhem in the streets. Is there an alternative to the SOE? I don’t see any. We should try to soften that hard bed. At the least, individuals caught up in the net should be housed at a place with first world conditions. The brother or sister noh guilty a notn, not in our courts!
If I was in Cabinet I would suggest that the individuals who won the score for the major inconvenience receive 50% or so of what they were awarded by the judge who thought we were wrong with the SOE. A judge done gaan and seh dehn should be compensated. It isn’t good for people to get their hopes up, and then get dropped so hard.
The SOE, it has its merits. I don’t know how many individuals won awards, and I don’t know if any of them would be dead or would have become murderers, if not for those SOEs. If Belize could afford it, the disruption of our lives and businesses, and if government was callous, had no care for its citizens, agh, it could say no to SOEs, go out and do to each other what you will.
Dammit, yes, it’s a slippery slope, as some lawyers say, a slippery slope to interfere with beautiful freedom; but no country can lie down in the face of violence. Mr. Elrington understood what violence costs a nation, that you can never make Singapore without strict discipline. Can you make a productive economy when people are tearing at it? Of course not! When he was in office, Brother Sedi proposed preventative detention (PD) to contain people who the police thought were bent on violence. He got crowed down.
We look at the freedom in these “first world” countries which were built on enslaving our ancestors and pillaging other people’s resources, and also, don’t forget this, crushing laws at home. (We should all have read Charles Dickens.) Now they have gained the world, have all the material trappings anyone could ever want, these first world people dictate to us about rights. Lee Kuan Yew, who was beginning from scratch, knew he couldn’t build Singapore with people having so much latitude. They still lash in Singapore, and they still execute people who are found guilty of murder.
We complain about our leaders going abroad to beg, but we want to run a soft country. Sure, we can continue to have all these freedoms, but we’ll never have a country without poverty if people are free to break up what others build, if our people live and operate in fear, if small businesses can’t open at night, if our young people can’t play in the fields and at the parks, if a young man and a young lady can’t walk home under the moonlight or street lights after a night out at a party without fear of being attacked.
Ah, Bukele! He’s a different story. He locks up people and throws away the key. The people of El Salvador said he had to do that. The people of Belize, I believe they understand why our authorities can’t do without the SOE tool. I stand with the judge that said the SOE was necessary. And with just a few tweaks, I’ll support that 13th.
About our inadequacies
Brother Nuri and Sister Yaya’s Sunday co-host said that our governments lean on the SOE to cover up their inadequacies. Ah, quite a number of people who have talked the talk, said that they had the answers, got the job, but we still remain inadequate. Many of the ones doing the talking now suggest that if they had the key they would make a difference, they would cure our inadequacies. We know what the accusing fingers are pointing at, the ills that new aspirants for leadership say they will fix so we can make a land where there is enough for all, a land where there is no poverty. Those two ills are corruption and incompetence, and it is for sure that they are two bad beasts. Yes, those two are, but know that there’s a whole lot more for us to conquer before we end inadequacy.
Yep, when we talk inadequacies the fingers are pointed at lack of competence, bad decisions, and corruption, willful robbery of the treasury to grease the paws of cronies. Those are drags on any economy, but only two of many hurdles we have to get over in Belize. We didn’t make the pandemic; we didn’t start any war; we don’t control the climate; we have a small population so our costs are high; we, rightly, of duty too, chose our reef over oil.
The issues our country faces don’t end there. A huge hurdle in dealing with our inadequacies is the fact that comparison, which is a very troublesome thing, is part of the fabric of a capitalist system. A sage in Toledo West, when the UN declared the area poverty-stricken, said that he used to think they were wealthy. It is for sure that in old Toledo, where all the houses were the same, their lives were idyllic. Of course, they didn’t all have the exact same worth. But obscene wealth was not resident in that part of the country, as it is in other areas.
Former PM, Said Musa spoke about television being like the invasion of an army of ten thousand. Overnight we started seeing things on television that we want our leaders to deliver for us, things only few in little capitalist Belize can have, and maybe should have. There are things in our system that can only be repaired if we sober up, and are sincere. Bah, our educated elite and the wealthiest, instead of investing in our people they are gaga on late model SUVs, vacations in Miami, the mansion, and growing their bank accounts.
I’ll end today with three more big contributors to our inadequacy. Three huge dividers of human beings are race, religion, and economic philosophy. The easy-to-manage country is made up of people of one race, one religion, and one economic philosophy. I, ehm, I think we are at the opposite end of that demographic. We all have a lot to do to keep our wonderful country from unraveling.