Responsibility vs revenge
Posted: 20/01/2007 - 11:15 AM
Author:
Speaking on LOVE FM’s morning show on Wednesday, at one point the Hon. Leader of the UDP Opposition, Dean Barrow, said, “We are trying to be responsible; we don’t want confrontation …” But later in the same show, a former UDP Belize Rural Central standard bearer called Mr. Barrow to say that Belize City Mayor, Zenaida Moya, had “more cojones” than the Leader had. The former UDP standard bearer also called on Mr. Barrow to come out of his law firm and begin campaigning.
The preliminary to Wednesday morning was Monday afternoon this week when Mayor Moya called a press conference, with her legal advisor, Michael Peyrefitte, at her side, to tell the nation that she had been demanding a dollar out of the tourist head tax, and that the following morning, Tuesday, she was going to make moves which would impress on the Belize Tourism Board and Tourism Minister, Hon. Godfrey Smith, just how serious she was. Belize being as small as it is, the word leaked out that Zenaida was going to block the streets and shut down the old capital. Word on the city streets was that three cruise ships, carrying thousands of foreign visitors, were expected in port the said Tuesday. Zenaida, in her perhaps unsophisticated way, was taking the bull by the horns. The lady was about to play hard ball.
The UDP Leader, who has to make sure Belize’s business moguls know that he is “responsible” enough to become our next Prime Minister, suddenly jumped into action. He had to make sure Zenaida called off the city shutdown, and in this matter the interests of the PUP leadership, specifically the Prime Minister and PUP Deputy Leader/Tourism Minister Hon. Smith, coincided with the interests of the Opposition Leader. Negotiations took place among Barrow, Musa and Smith which ended up with Zenaida being bridled, at least temporarily, by Monday evening, January 15.
Something happened here which is indicative of a growing tension within the UDP. Mr. Barrow wants a smooth, “responsible” transition from PUP to UDP rule, but the masses of the Belizean people, including many of the Opposition’s members and supporters, want revenge for hundreds of millions of dollars which the people will have to re-pay for public funds which disappeared into the bank accounts of PUP leaders and cronies.
On Monday, if we are to judge from the general reaction at the base of the social pyramid, Zenaida may have caught a political wave, to use the language of surfing. Is she completely aware of the power of the “revenge” genie she was about to let out of the bottle on Tuesday morning? That is a question to which the Hon. Barrow needs to know the answer. We are not sure that he does, because Zenaida is a relatively new UDP. (She came out of the union movement in 2005.) After she was elected Belize City Mayor in a huge UDP landslide on March 1 last year, the sense we got was that the Barrow/Finnegan axis viewed Zenaida in a paternalistic, if not disrespectful, way.
We are not going to pursue this analysis much further. The UDP is a hypersensitive party. They can’t handle criticism. There are UDP people who are passing opinions on WAVE Radio and in the GUARDIAN who don’t know what it is that they are talking about. A few weeks ago the said people charged that we on Partridge had a personal grudge against Hon. Barrow. The people publicizing these opinions were diapered babies in cribs during the time of UBAD and the birth of the UDP. This means they are expressing opinions which they are accepting blindly from anonymous, older elements in the UDP.
We predict that Zenaida will be a problem for Mr. Barrow in the run to general elections. And Mr. Barrow is not in a strong position to agitate for early elections, because he was UDP Deputy Party Leader and Deputy Prime Minister in 1998 when the ruling UDP not only refused to call early elections, they refused to call it after their five-year term! They went five years, two months and 28 days before they called the elections. Result? PUP 26 – UDP 3.
The PUP will try to stay in power as long as they can. But this stubbornness will not help the UDP in the way that UDP intransigence aided the PUP in 1998. PUP stubbornness in 2007 will give the fledgling third party more time to mature, while at the same time the tension inside the UDP between the “responsible” leadership and the “revengeful” rank and file, will grow. The intriguing aspect of political developments as 2007 unfolds, is that Zenaida may become a lady who has options. ‘Nuff said.
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