Barrow is Bogus

by glenntillett@yahoo.com

I did not know Dean Barrow would make an appearance on LOVE TV’s Belize Watch show this week, and so I have no idea how he was received or what was said for the vast majority of the show. By the time I tuned in host Rene Villanueva Sr., was announcing that they were taking their last call and would be wrapping up.

The two men appeared in convivial good spirits, and Barrow expressed his wish that Belizeans would be more patriotic and united. I felt disgusted at both men.

In Rene’s case I suppose I should be used to his sycophantic behavior when it comes to ruling politicians, and I acknowledge that it has served him well. I am also not sure that it is a bad thing that he is almost always apathetic politically, and only appears partisan as a matter of convenience.

He also owns, operates and manages Belize’s largest electronic media, however, and I personally would like it if he showed that even philosophically at least, he understood that we are a nation in peril.

Dean Barrow is a disgrace. I can hardly contain my disgust whenever I see or hear him speaking these days.  Yes, I am angry.  Dean Barrow is a master hypocrite and hypocrisy angers and disgusts me.

On the show Barrow continued making excuses for his administration’s ineptness and corruption by again claiming the previous administration was worse. While in my partisan view that is hardly the case, the simple fact is that Belize is worst off since he took office, and the prognosis is that it will keep getting worse.

And the unarguable fact is that after two and a half years, and millions of dollars paid to his ex-wife Lois Young-Barrow, he has still has yet to have successfully prosecuted anyone for anything done under the authority of the previous administration.

If you think about it you must agree Lois has been like a highly paid special prosecutor.

Barrow can argue till the cows come home that he is engaged in an “unrelenting fight against crime” but the reality is that the results of all that relentless crime fighting so far has only been more crime.

If Barrow won’t start with corruption in high places and fairly and squarely look the monster that is trafficking in all its forms in its eyes then all he is doing is wasting our precious time and money.  The insidious effect and deleterious impact of trafficking is the root cause of nearly all that ails Belize’s socially, economically and politically.

At first I used to be bemused at Barrow’s invidiousness but now it is just irritating and frustrating. Time’s a-wasting and people are dying while Barrow plays his games.

Barrow and his cohorts tabled an Auditor General’s report of an audit of the Lands Department at last week’s House meeting in yet another effort to prove their allegations of massive corruption in the former administration. The report of an audit of some of the transactions done there between September 2007 and February 2008, purportedly took over a year to complete, and though the Auditor General signed off on it in May 2009, it is only now being tabled for public consumption.

The decision to delay its publication by over a year until now is of course a matter of strategic timing. The timing of Barrow’s appearance on Belize Watch is therefore not coincidental.

I would guess that the majority of the electorate believes that because Barrow is a rich man, he does not need to be corrupt, and ergo is probably not corrupt. This is why his hypocrisy is so sickening. In the end it is just senseless.

The Flippin’ Minister Hulse tabled the report and highlighted the fact that in late 2007 former Caribbean Shores Area Representative Joe Coye’s daughter paid some $10,000 to purchase a lot that had been leased to her 1999. The Lands Department had valued the lot for twice that much and the then Minister of Lands Florencio Marin gave her a discount. Hulse made it sound like hanky-panky because the audit questioned the transaction, as they did the majority of the transactions where the minister discounted the valuation.

Nobody told the auditors, and it would seemed they did not bother to ask, that the Cabinet of the previous administration had authorized a 50% discount for all transactions during that period since they were determined to give as many Belizeans as possible a piece of land.

You can argue the moral “rightness or wrongness” of that decision, but you can’t argue its legitimacy. And for those of us with long memories and a knowledge of our political history, well, we remember the 1993-98 UDP administration’s LOP (Land Ownership Program) that sold lots in that same area of Belize City for $300.00, almost exclusively to their relatives, cronies and supporters.

Barrow the hypocrite does not have a conscience it seems. I am sorry I missed the opportunity to ask him on the air live, how much he paid for his seaside piece of the Jewel just last year. It is bigger than Miss Coye’s piece, but I am willing to bet he paid a lot less. In fact I know he paid a lot less.

Lois is “paying” herself tens of thousands of taxpayers’ dollars by taking Joe Coye and Florencio Marin to court because she says they conspired to defraud the government of revenue when they sold swamp lots, without any road access, streets, drains, utilities or other amenities, to Belizeans in 2007 for $4,000.00 each.

The real fraud is Dean Barrow paying the Government of Belize some $7,000 last year for that third of an acre of filled, beachfront property on which his mansion rests.

Barrow is bogus.

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