John Briceño: “The U.D.P. Government is Broke…Belizeans Paying a Heavy Price.”

John Briceño

Government is out of cash in the treasury and debt will continue to grow as government looks to borrow and borrow to meet its wage bill and other obligations. Briceño, in a one-on-one interview with News Five, asserts that for twelve years the government has mismanaged the country and its finance and now a heavy price will be paid by Belizeans.

John Briceño, Leader of the Opposition

“After spending over six hundred million dollars from petroleum, almost five hundred million from Petrocaribe, borrowing billions of dollars. He gets his budget approved the first of April; six days later he announces that the government is broke. It shows all along that the emperor had no clothes; that the U.D.P. has mismanaged the government, has mismanaged the economy and now all of us collectively are paying a heavy price that will require lots of sacrifices from everyone.  Today, the U.D.P. government is broke and unfortunately all of us will have to pay for the mismanagement of twelve, almost thirteen years of a U.D.P. government, where they have spent over thirteen billion dollars and today we have more poverty, we have more unemployment; we’ve even had more crime—thankfully because of the state of emergency, we seem to have a control on it. We see the problems that we had in the Ministry of Health that we were not properly prepared. I mean the litany of problems that is coming to fore because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The U.D.P. government instead of making life better for Belizeans has made things worst and now here we are today as a broke government that is going to cause some undue pain on every single Belizeans all across this country.”