Page 86 - Gilbert & Me_Neat

Day Nineteen

Monday, April 27 , 2020
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6.25am:
Heading for the office today, so up early. Shave, shower….

First coffee of the day to get me going. Then out the door by 7.30.

Get to the office, log into emails and begin the day. I have 169 emails to consider – I end up
deleted almost all of them without even bothering to read them. I log into facebook – just to see
if there’s anything there interesting. Not much for sure, except, there’s a comment by a wannabe
politician complaining about the Government’s apparent inability to reform policies, preferring
to stick to the old colonial way of doing things.

I can’t recall now, exactly what caused this man to make his comment, but I know that this man
will not resist ANY temptation to attack Britain and blame everything that is wrong with Belize
on the former colonial power. His ignorance annoys me. First, no other country has been actively
influencing Belizean politics for the last thirty eight years – when Belize became independent of
Great Britain. Since that date, the only people influencing politics here has been those elected by
the people. So, to still be blaming the ills of our current Government on Britain is both senseless
and foolish. If anything, the problems we are experiencing are the result of the voters being
ignorant of their rights and responsibility to elect political leaders who demonstrate morals and
passion for their country, instead of demanding money for their pockets.

Second, his own attempts to get elected failed miserably when, together with some other
malcontents, he put himself forward as a member of the third party to contest the last general
election. However, that attempt collapsed when at the press conference to launch their new
political party, they couldn’t spell the name of their party correctly and, then, failed to adequately
explain who the leader was. People lost faith and the third party quickly split into a series of
small factions, none of which had the wherewithal to contest a national general election.

We do need a third party. The same two main parties have been successively embarrassing this
country for the past thirty eight years; the same old unreliable, untrustworthy faces have been
dominating politics, breeding contempt, corruption and incompetence. The result is a country
whose economy has stagnated; whose young people leave in search of employment and
prosperity elsewhere and whose poverty level has remained unchanged since before
independence was granted. The same old promises are made and broken, by the same old, tired,
money-grabbing politicians. And this character is symptomatic of those problems – he and his
fellows haven’t a clue how to fix the country, but are eager to complain. They have no solutions
to the challenges Belizeans face day after day, yet are happy to criticise those they have
themselves allowed to rule.