The United Democratic Party (UDP) would do the country a great service if they put out a manifesto that promised the 4-year term and then proceeded to call the next general elections before the end of November, 2019. (The UDP’s present term started on November 4, 2015.)
The People’s United Party (PUP), if they are serious about reform, should put the 4-year term in their manifesto again, so that, whoever won, there would be a decrease in the duration of their term. The PUP had the 4-year term on a set date in their 2015 manifesto, but they lost at the polls.
The PUP didn’t lose because their manifesto included the end of the tedious 5-year term. They lost because they were mired in an intra-party ideological battle and couldn’t find common ground, and the UDP was rolling in Petro Caribe funds, the oil wells were still gushing, and they declared a satisfactory settlement to the BTL negotiations, thanks to Lord Ashcroft becoming a Good Samaritan.
The deal the Prime Minister presented to the people just before the 2015 general elections wasn’t that good at all, but there was an important clause that promised to soften some of the pain. It turned out after the dust settled on the 2015 elections, which the UDP won, that the mitigating clause was all sham. It could be argued that the UDP lied to the people so that they could get over in the election. Take out the mitigating clause, which was all sham, and the UDP might not have gone clear in seven divisions, which they won by a grand total of 949 votes, an average of 135 per division. The UDP won that election 19-12.
The present term of the UDP, 2015 to 20—, has become very sour. The UHS (Universal Health Services) loan, which a Musa government guaranteed, is still with us, and the coffers of the bank that provided the loan are getting fatter and fatter off the interest, to the point where the interest on the loan is reportedly now more than twice the value of the principal owed.
Deadly violence was a huge problem when the UDP took over in 2008, with murders regularly in the high double digits, and now we are in the triple digits, nearing an average of about 140 murders each year. The murder rate in our country is horrific, and while each one is a tragedy, there have been some that are particularly shocking, gruesome.
The murder of Pastor Llewellyn Lucas was grotesque, and that heinous crime was compounded by the fact that a number of our political leaders were acquaintances of the principal suspect in the case.
The death of Allyson Major last week, at the hands of the police, comes close on the heels of the death of Nestor Vasquez, Jr., who lost his life while in police custody. These deaths are particularly worrisome, frightening. The evidence shows that police deliberately put Vasquez in a cell with a man who had exhibited extremely violent tendencies, and the evidence shows that Major, a 36-year-old school teacher, was chased and shot by police because they suspected that he was in possession of some marijuana. That entire incident played out in full view of a number of citizens who were going about their business in an area of Belize City which is usually crowded.
Belizeans are being killed at a rate that puts us among the five most murderous places on earth, and to add injury to our pain, there is no justice for the murdered and their families. Our murder-solving capacity is amongst the most dismal in the world. The buck stops with leaders. They get paid handsomely. They get the praise when things go right, which is very rare these days, and they take the blame for failures, the far more common story today.
In the business realm our leaders exhibit a naiveté we cannot afford. It seems it doesn’t matter who you are, if you give indications that you have some money, our government has the time: you can play.
We recall Puerto Azul, with government ministers and ministers’ wives being wined and dined in Cannes, France, where they celebrated the fantastic tourism project that was being proposed for Northern Two Cay. That island was to have the grand hotel, airstrip, everything¯all the luxury the human mind can dream of. It turned out that our all-too-eager leaders were being used by international crooks who were setting up a fake project to attract and bilk innocent investors.
The Sanctuary Bay scam took a while to be exposed, but when the cover flew off that pot, a rotten soup hit the fan. The lid on this one was thrown off by no less than the USA’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC), who described what they found as the worst real estate fraud they had ever seen. They could be exaggerating. That department has seen many, many fraudulent schemes in their time, so it’s hard to believe that we are prominent, at the least as facilitators, in the worst of them all.
Belize can’t afford to dig under the layers of these scams, but we will point out that when our leaders get into transactions with crooks, many thoughts come to the minds of our people, and foreigners. At best our leaders could be described as gullible fellows.
Our economy is struggling, with tourism being just about the only feel-good story right now. Most everything else is down. The agro-industries, except for bananas, are down; oil production is down; the Petro Caribe train has stopped rolling; the national telecommunications company is not doing well. The government, to avert total collapse, is borrowing heavily for road infrastructure, a couple of those roads causing eyebrows to go up. Those two are namely the Caracol Road and the Airport Road.
The Statistical Institute of Belize (SIB) says the numbers are not the worst, but the truth is in the streets. The violence, the scams, and the stumbling economy are stories of failure. Many of our people don’t have or barely have the cash to pay the utility bills; murders and armed robberies are far too common; financial scandals are rife; our freedoms are being repressed. These are very down times, our government has no answers, and they have 16 months left on their five-year mandate. We have been here before, and as it was then, it is now: we are not in a nice place.
We were in this place around 1997, this place where our government had run out of gas and was just hanging on to power. We were in this place in 2007, this place where our government had run out of gas and was just hanging on to power. We are in this place now, 2019, where we are just going through the motions. The government is flat out of gas, but it will only call general elections before its five-year mandate is up if it considers the climate is favorable for its reelection.
Three times in a little over two decades we have had a government that is just marking time, and that should say something. The longer they hang on, the more they erode and the more the people suffer. If we had a four-year term the general elections would be just a few months from now.
You see your neighbor with a good idea, you adopt it. When your neighbor sees you with a good idea, they adopt it. That is how we grow. The most celebrated democracy in the world, the USA, has had a four-year term since the days of George Washington. It works for them. Five years isn’t working for us.