By Horace Palacio:
When the only man in post-independence history to win three straight elections handicaps the next one, the whole country should lean in.
Dean Barrow did exactly that this week. His verdict, delivered to 7 News with the candor of a man with nothing left to campaign for, lands in three blows. The United Democratic Party has not gelled. Tracy Panton, he was careful to say, is leading from the front and deserves no blame for it. And yet, as things stand, John Briceño will likely match Barrow’s own three-peat in 2030, not because the government has earned it, Barrow says too many ministers were caught with their hands in the cookie jar, but because the Opposition lacks the muscularity to collect the price.
Then the old champion said the most important sentence of the interview. He does not want Belize to become a one-party state. No party, he said, should hold power too long.
Sit with that, Belize, because it is the whole column in miniature. A government that cannot lose stops listening. We have the receipts. Sixteen years without a new power plant, because neither party ever feared the voter on megawatts. A scandal answered with silence, a portal promised and still a sentence, a six dollar wage parked in the near future with no date. That is not what wicked men look like. That is what an unthreatened incumbent looks like, of any color, in any era. Competition is the citizens’ only leverage, and right now the customer cannot credibly walk across the street. So today, this column writes two letters, one to each leader, because Barrow’s verdict is really a pair of assignments.
First, to the Leader of the Opposition.
Madam Leader, the elder statesman defended you personally, and this column has done the same, your question in the House on the BEL shares, investment or bailout, was the most surgical piece of opposition work all year. Effort is not your problem. Architecture is. So here are five moves.
One, settle the house, or the house will keep settling you. Your party’s disease, this column diagnosed it during the leadership noise, is not the nameplate at the top but the absence of agreed rules underneath it. So stage the party’s own Glass Year. One convention everyone accepts, published delegate rolls, financing in daylight. And then do the move nobody expects, build the front door yourself. The reform challenger circling your leadership was told by this column to refuse every side entrance. Your winning answer is to construct the legitimate one, invite him in, hand him a real platform, a reform commission, a policy portfolio, a fair contest if he wants one. A leader confident enough to host a clean fight wins either way, because she emerges either victorious or vindicated, and the civil war ends in both endings.
Two, become the nation’s auditor-in-chief. Barrow’s word was muscularity, and hear what it does not mean. It does not mean volume. The government’s vulnerabilities are already documented, the unexplained millions, the overdue portal, the missing whistleblower law, three years of undrawn solar financing, a tripled deficit, an undated wage. Your weapon is boring, relentless documentation. A monthly promise tracker, five numbers, no adjectives, delivered on the same day every month until the whole country can recite it. Outrage evaporates. Ledgers accumulate.
Three, offer the alternative, not just the autopsy. The thousands of Belizeans tired of stale arguments need somewhere to go, and a critique is not an address. Name a shadow cabinet. Publish what your government would do, on the wage trigger, on the energy deadlines, on the portal, with dates. Win the argument first. The election follows arguments won.
Four, pick three fights and win them visibly. Opposition resources are thin, so concentrate. The portal’s December 31 deadline. The publication of the Mira audit. The wage date. Three campaigns, pressed weekly, until each one is either delivered or becomes a monument to delay. Small, visible wins are how gelling actually happens.
And five, circle March 2027 in red. The municipals are your survival exam. Field full slates in all nine municipalities, set honest targets, and overperform them. Nothing gels a party like a scoreboard that moved.
Now, to the Prime Minister.
Sir, the most dangerous gift you received all year arrived this week, the opposing team’s greatest champion announcing you will probably win. Do not drink it. As things stand is the most treacherous phrase in politics, because things never stand. Barrow knows better than any man alive what a third term costs, and here is what he left unsaid. A third term won by walkover is an asterisk. A third term earned against a real contest makes you the defining Prime Minister of the era. The difference is not messaging. It is delivery, and your calendar is already written.
Keep your own December deadline. The portal, live, by the thirty-first. It is your promise, dated by your own mouth, and meeting it begins lifting the albatross no reshuffle can rename away.
Lance the boil yourself. Publish the Auditor General’s findings on the Mira matter before anyone demands them, and bring the whistleblower law to the House in your own government’s name. Steal the churches’ demand and own it. Incumbents are rarely destroyed by scandals. They are destroyed by the years of silence after them.
Give the fifty thousand their date. Your government gave sixteen thousand public officers an eight percent raise with a calendar. The minimum wage earners hold a promise with none. That juxtaposition is a loaded weapon on your opponents’ table. Take it off, with a date or a published trigger.
Pass the 8pm Test before the campaign. Thirty megawatts by June 2027 is your own announced number, and a blackout-free 2029 is re-election insurance no advertising budget can purchase. Deliver the megawatts and the stale arguments die of irrelevance.
Renew the bench in daylight. Announcing you will lead into 2030 settles one question and raises another, what comes after you. Voters forgive a long-serving leader who visibly builds heirs. They punish a closed shop. The elevation of younger ministers this week was a start. Make succession a feature, not a whisper, and run your own party’s contests as cleanly as this column demands of your rivals.
And one move that costs nothing, sir. This column recently drafted the minute no Belizean leader has ever spoken, sixty seconds honoring an opponent’s climb. A Prime Minister told he cannot lose can afford magnanimity better than anyone in the country. Speak the minute. It would scramble the exhausted politics of this nation in your favor overnight, and it would deserve to.
Here is the synthesis, Belize, and it is the reason this column advised both camps in one breath.
Barrow’s warning, read properly, is not a prediction. It is a pair of assignments with the same deadline. Hers, to make 2030 a contest. His, to deserve to win it anyway. If both succeed, the country wins no matter whose hand is raised, because a government that can lose listens, and an opposition that can win prepares. That is the entire design of the system we inherited, and it only works switched on.
The only shameful outcome in 2030 is a walkover, in either direction.
And if we get one anyway, remember the oldest finding in this column’s files. Walkovers are never taken, Belize.
They are purchased, by electorates that stopped charging admission.
Set the price high. Make them both earn the belt.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author, Horace Palacio, and do not necessarily reflect the views or editorial stance of Breaking Belize News.
