by Colin Hyde
Last week’s local Guardian called out BTL for the announced sale of some prime property in Belmopan, property which BTL says it is divesting to raise funds so it can expand into areas that don’t have telecommunication/internet services. The Guardian said there’s a PUP plot to destroy the company, that their party leader “has long been warning Belizeans about the PUP’s diabolical plan to sabotage the country’s national telecommunications company, BTL, to the benefit of the Briceños’ private company SMART.”
Now, everybadi an dehn grani know the Briceño family is the minority shareholder in Smart. We have the goods on the share divisions in Smart because some years ago the UDP, maybe when the party was more honest, produced documents that showed that Ashcroft affiliates controlled 80% of the company. The UDP needs to respect the people, speak the truth. Of course, the minority shareholder can’t be ignored, especially when the PM is a hero in the family. But a minority shareholder is not the owner. Less than 50% is the tail, not the dog.
The UDP stated that the PUP’s destruction of our BTL was planned to be executed in four phases, with two steps already scaled. This sale of the property is the third, the UDP says, and the foul fourth, the final blow, will see our company sink into bankruptcy. About this third phase, the UDP says “there is no logical explanation for the sale of BTL’s headquarters in the capital city Belmopan.”
If there is skullduggery here, we’ll have to look elsewhere for an analysis, because the UDP doesn’t have any credibility. Hmm, minus forensics this latest BTL decision might well be valid. Selling off a piece of property the company doesn’t foresee any use for, a piece of property which could come to life in the hands of other people, and using the monies derived from the sale for a great purpose: expanded coverage in areas that are well-deserving, on the surface that doesn’t look like we are being cleaned out.
Ah, it’s prime land, and prime land should not sit idling. While BTL will have control over whom the land is sold to, after it is sold the private owners will be able to do what they want. Could unscrupulous people get land near to BTL?
The “first phase”, some government departments switching to SMART, was pretty daam hard to explain. PM John Briceño keeps saying it’s all in the name of competition, that what they’re doing will make BTL great again. Let’s get this very clear: Smart and all the companies in the telecommunications/internet game wouldn’t exist if Ashcroft and his crowd still owned BTL. The records show that. When the government pushed a rival company, Intelco, because the Ashcroft-controlled BTL was not delivering internet to schools sufficiently (I read that in Said Musa’s book), the Ashcroft crowd refused them the key to the cable that provides access to the outside world.
If this game winds up with BTL dead and Smart supreme, then somebody got our $600 million AND we are left with a shell AND the group that got the money got back the business under another name! Bah, to put the brake on this party, with the GoB and the GoB-controlled SSB being complicit in the plot to phase out BTL and hand us over to Smart, all the mighty UDP can come up with is a call to little non-government shareholders to step up.
We must ask questions about any company that is public property. And the UDP, the main opposition party, is expected to lead the charge. But dammit, this party is so deeply invested in wiles. How can one respect the UDP’s opinion when they are so cute? Please stop confusing the people. Tell the truth and shame the devil. Any discussion that involves Smart must begin with the primary owner.
Bah, we know that Ashcroft has big shares in the PUP. One party in Ashcroft’s hip pocket is already too much.
Sweet Simone Biles losing some sugar because of haters
The only way to prevent falling victim to people who enjoy hate is to have people by your side who have good counsel and will do your dirty work for you. There’s this great lesson from the life of Jesus, okay, His greatest lesson, where He lays down His life for His friends. Friends must defend friends when friends are unfairly targeted.
An individual, especially one who is in the public eye, needs friends who will protect them. If you want a prime example at ground level, I give you Delroy. Look how he sells his blank for his party leader!
Rotten aaplz attacked Simone’s relationship with her husband, attacked her for something to do with the gymnastics team, and attacked her hair. For quite some time, Simone parried the blows, did not engage. I didn’t see any friends stepping up with necessary big sticks to bash the philistines, and because no good insulators came forward, now, of late we’ve seen some retorts from Simone that tarnish her luster. It was inevitable. Everyone needs their night rest; no one can sleep well if they are being hounded by rude people. The unfair stress could have been stuffed if our adopted girl had people around her who understood their responsibility to buffer her, fend off the blows. She’s only human. She needs protection.
I understand why her husband didn’t protect her. He can’t. The attacks on Simone come from jealous womankind, and you know a man can’t get mixed up in that gender’s warfare. While Simone was absolutely right to defend her husband, who was under stupid attack for wearing her gold medal, she’ll have to get some insulation for the other stuff.
I have another bit of advice. Stay out of politics. She is mainly in an individual sport, so she has near full rights to say what she wants, but it’s not good for her. I understand the temptation, but at this time she should just let the gymnastics do the talking. Okay, I’ll end with that.
Marcus and the KKK
His meeting with the notorious KKK in America in 1922 galvanized Marcus Garvey’s enemies and detractors, both black and white, to move in and destroy him. At the time, Marcus’s UNIA dwarfed other black organizations in the US. Infoplease says the population of African Americans in 1920 was 10.5 million. JSTOR Daily says, “Garvey’s UNIA, formed in 1914, was the largest organization of this kind. At its peak from 1920 to 1924, it had more than a million dues-paying members and two or three times as many people who were engaged with its programs.”
JSTOR Daily says “The UNIA primarily focused on economic independence for Black people in the US and around the world”, preparing “young people for skilled labor while building self-esteem and racial pride”, and encouraging Black Americans to “think of the [Black] race in the highest terms of human living, to think that God made the race perfect, that there is no one better than you.” The UNIA “decried substandard education provided to Black communities, protested against white teachers who insisted on the superiority of their own race, and demanded that Black children learn about ‘Negro History’ in their schools.”… “the UNIA did not call for the racial integration of schools.”
The Daily Telegraph says, Marcus said: ”I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon clubs and White American societies, as far as the Negro is concerned, as better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together.” The Daily Telegraph says Garvey “became convinced blacks would never be allowed to integrate with whites in the US and he even met with leaders of the KKK who supported his scheme of separating the races” and, that “he made the mistake of saying the blacks should learn from the fervour of the white supremacist organisation. It brought him into conflict with Du Bois, who called Garvey ‘the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and in the world’”.
When Marcus met with the KKK, he wasn’t the favorite of the American Black intellectuals because his UNIA had grown too quickly and had become too powerful. Many American Blacks were pushing integration, while Marcus, who had his greatest appeal among Caribbean Blacks, wasn’t.
Aha, it is said he didn’t trust brown Blacks. He might have been a little off base in the US, the brown Black reality in America being so different from the brown Black reality in the Caribbean. The super racist White America had decreed that a single drop of Afro blood made you a Black, while in our world we who are brown can stick around, going “up” the scale.
Marcus shouldn’t have met with the KKK. I suspect he had limited knowledge of American history, why he made that error. That decision gave his enemies the ammunition they needed to destroy him. They and their white allies, the very whites Marcus had called “fakes”, pounced and savaged the great man. In closing for today, I will say that Marcus’s vision was what Belize needed. I think his vision was the best thing for the US too, but that doesn’t count.