By Belize Live News Staff: Ask any Prime Minister about the public service wage bill and expect careful words. John Briceño chose a fruit instead.
“The public service right now is like a pear, you have a small top and the bottom is big,” the Prime Minister said, responding to concerns about the ever-growing wage bill, and with that image he opened a remarkably candid conversation about how Belize’s government workforce got its shape, and how he intends to slim it without firing anyone.
The plan is patience. As public officers retire, government will simply not replace them all. “That’s how we would be able to control it without retrenching,” Briceño explained, leaning on attrition and a project he says will help government do better.
The pear problem, though, runs deeper than size. Every ministry, by the PM’s own account, is starving for technical people, while the broad bottom of the service lacks the expertise the top desperately needs. And how did the bottom get so big? Briceño pointed at his own profession. Hiring, he said, must move away “from the politicians to just hire, ‘Oh, this is my friend or my voter, give them a job.'”
Then came the admissions that give the interview its weight. His own supporters, he revealed, pressure the government for not purging UDP hires the way 2008 went, when, as Briceño recalled it, the then Prime Minister declared in the National Assembly, “To the winner, the spoils.” And during the pandemic, he disclosed, the IMF told government to shed some 3,000 workers. The government refused. “I don’t think it’s fair to take advantage of people who are barely eking out a living,” he said. “You want to deal, deal with the big guys, but not the people out there.”
His north star, he says, is the public service of the early independence era, genuinely independent, professionally staffed, insulated from the voter-list hiring that both parties have practised for generations.
Credit where due: it is rare to hear a sitting Prime Minister describe the patronage machine this plainly, rarer still to hear him admit his own base demands he feed it. The skepticism writes itself too, attrition is a slow diet for a big pear, and the “system” to depoliticize hiring remains a thing to be found, not a thing announced.
But the destination he described, a service that serves the public rather than the party, is one every Belizean taxpayer has a stake in. The question, as always, is whether the words survive contact with the next election.
What do you think, Belize, can any government truly take politics out of public service hiring? Let us know in the comments.
