Barrow is bogus

by glenntillett@yahoo.com

I hardly envisioned when I wrote the first “Barrow is bogus” column four months ago that I would still be at it now, that it would take on a life of its own, and that my faithful readers would demand that I do not stop until I had mined this unfortunately rich vein until it was arid and sere.

Each week I see so much more I want to wax politically on but somehow my perspective always returns to the disappointments that the promise of Dean Oliver Barrow’s ascension to Maximum Leader is visiting on us all daily.

On the aptly named April Fool’s Day the increase in the General Sales Tax kicked us in the rear pockets where we keep our wallets and almost immediately we “heard” that it would not be enough to fill Barrow’s deficit because once again he had mis-calculated.

Simultaneously the price of oil on the futures market edged up near the US$90 per barrel benchmark reminding us that it was at that price the now mythical “windfall” tax is supposed to kick in, but alors and alas for Dean Barrow at least, it started to edge back down.

With a gallon of premium gas now $9.95 per gallon at the pump we are all braced for it to hurdle $10.00 in the next round of hikes. What we never seem ever able to prepare, however, is escalating prices of everything at the stores and shops. It is a psychologically wearing experience that ultimately produces a sort of “life-fatigue.” Where will it stop, you wonder, and will it ever get better?

Just this week PUP Chairman Carolyn Trench Sandiford reminded me that Barrow and the UDP had pledged that if elected they would LOWER GST. I know, you think I am making this up because even in retrospect it seems impossible that anyone could’ve been that reckless and we would’ve still voted for them.

The reality, however, is that on January 10^th, 2008 Dean Barrow and the UDP solemnly pledged that they would lower GST and on April 1^st, 2010 he not only did just the opposite and increased the tax, but the prospects are good that this is not the only time he is going to increase the GST. Awesome, as my girls would say, it just takes your breath away.

Even in the midst of my contemplation of these and other things bogus about Dean Barrow it hit me that I had overlooked perhaps the greatest example of them all. And it struck me because last Friday evening I met some kids reading my column by lamplight way in rural Toledo West.

I am sure that the village I was visiting along with PUP Party Leader Johnny Briceno Dean Barrow has never visited. It was an inspiring experience to meet two kids – I figure they were about 10, 12 years old, who actually thought that reading a newspaper on a Friday evening was entertaining.

I am sure the fact that the village didn’t have electricity, hence television, may have something to do with it, but hey, I am a writer and I love readers. I was also pretty sure that unlike the majority of children and students in Dean Barrow’s constituency, these young persons, a boy and a girl, had every reason to be optimistic about their own and their village’s future.

See, in my view Barrow is bogus because in seven terms as the area representative for the Queen Square division he has yet to have built anything at all. Since he became the area representative in 1984, the area has gone steadily downhill.

It is difficult for me to see why anyone would want to vote for Dean Barrow as the area representative for Queen Square when the people there are worse off now than when he started.

If Dean Barrow should run again, and is re-elected, he would become one of the longest continuously serving area representatives in Belize’s history, tying Florencio Marin, Sr., I think.

But it is not the people who actually live, no suffer in Queen Square who’ve decided that they want Dean Barrow to represent them. No siree, it is a bunch of Belizean Americans who are flown in every election to vote for him. They don’t live in Belize, they just vote here.

They don’t have to live amidst the neglect and squalor, amid the jackers and the gun shots. They don’t have to watch their young men shooting one another dead with regularity while their area representative, the most powerful man in Belize, does nothing.

It is even worse when you consider that he is joined by three other UDP representatives whom he has made powerful Cabinet ministers, and none of whom are political novices: Finnegan is a four-time area representative, while Faber and Boots are both two-term representatives.

Queen Square is no better off for Dean Barrow’s record long stewardship and he is so bogus he doesn’t even have the decency to resign.

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