Zenaida Moya has now turned out to be the biggest mistake of Dean Barrow’s ten-year leadership tenure in the United Democratic Party. At the time the UDP ditched Sir Andie for “Z” in late 2005 or so, we thought it was a mistake. We thought it was a mistake not because we expected Zenaida to get out of control, but because we were Sir Andie fans. Mr. Barrow is a GQ kind of guy, however, and the Belizean people like their leaders and politicians to be like this. For sure Zenaida was a better candidate, in the strictly political equation, than the Sir, but Zenaida was form. Sir Andie would have been function. The Hon. Barrow went for form.
The Belize City Council is streets, drains, garbage and traffic. Zenaida turned it into a campaign stage or a global television studio. The nuts and bolts of the mayor’s job began to get the better of her. But the people of Belize City were in love with Zenaida. Zenaida was one of the Southside roots who had made it, and she had made it quickly and publicly. She was a blazing meteor in the sky. In a way, and incredibly, Zenaida became bigger than Dean Barrow.
It was not that Mr. Barrow was jealous of her, we don’t think. Constitutionally, he was hardly threatened, and our sense is that he may not have thought Zenaida was that big of a deal. Last year’s attempt by the mainstream UDP to replace Zenaida with Anthony Michael as the UDP’s mayoral candidate for the March 2009 CitCo run, backfired. It was badly handled. “Somebody” underestimated Zenaida. The UDP figured that with Councilor Mark King’s media outburst, UDP elder statesman and former Prime Minister Manuel Esquivel’s public denunciation of the Moya administration, and the lining up of the vast majority of the City Councilors behind Anthony Michael, Zenaida’s goose was cooked. Not so! Zenaida whipped them all.
Re-elected to another three-year term as Mayor seven months ago, when she must have already been in young pregnancy, Zenaida got married two months later, and prepared for the coming of her first child. Exactly what was going on with the Belize City Council’s finances is a job for auditors, but it is the business of all the citizens of the old capital. Things just kept looking worse and worse.
This put the Prime Minister in a dilemma, because he had insisted on making himself a poster boy for honesty and transparency. Now the UDP’s most high profile star had all kinds of financial question marks around her. Barrow knew the answers. If he did not, he was in a position to have the questions answered for him. His anti-corruption credibility was at stake. And so he sent in the hounds.
Moya refused to take maternity leave. She worked up until September 10, the day before she gave birth, and then was caught by television cameramen a little more than a week later coming out of her City Hall office. The P.M.’s hounds had jumped through the only real window of opportunity available to them – Zenaida’s delivery time. Arrested and charged last Thursday, October 1, when she should have been at home nursing her son and herself recovering from his Caesarian birth, Zenaida lashed out against the Prime Minister in front of the assembled print and electronic media of Belize City.
The economy of Belize has shrunk dramatically this year, and the future does not look bright. The Belize City Council owes millions of dollars to the city’s garbage companies, and sanitation workers are out in the streets demonstrating. Zenaida’s timing was impeccable when she moved from union activism into UDP municipal politics in 2005. The PUP was still in power, but the handwriting was on the wall – the UDP was coming. Moya caught a wave in 2005, and she surfed all the way to Xanadu.
Time will now tell whether Zenaida can survive the timing of her present situation. October 2009 looks like a time of belt tightening and austerity. Zenaida is not giving off these kinds of vibes. It may be that her 2009 timing is as awkward as her 2005 timing was wonderful. Today, Belize City needs some function. Jump high, jump low, that’s just the way it is.
Power to the people.