Musa Says Budget is Hangover from Bazaar Spending by G.O.B.

Said Musa

In his presentation, Musa took on the deficit in the 2015/2016 budget – a one hundred and eighty-two million dollar gap between revenue and actual expenditure. It’s an unprecedented deficit in the region of five point one percent of GDP, and Musa says that it is the hangover from what he called the bazaar spending to win elections in 2015.

Said Musa, Area Representative, Fort George

“The Prime Minister has presiding over the expenditure of about eight billion dollars—eight with a B—and so obsessed was the leader of the U.D.P. to win a third term. So obsessed were all of them in fact that he has indeed gone for broke and now the country is broke, thousands of Belizeans are broke. The treasury has been raided Mister Speaker, the Central Bank has been raided; amount of treasury bills have more than doubled. The government has been on a spending binge and like the proverbial drunken sailor, while the spree was going on, there was no concern about tomorrow. And in addition to the billion spent from the budgeted amounts collected from the people in taxes, they also borrowed and spent millions more. We’ve heard about the three hundred and twenty-five million of Petrocaribe funds; loan funds, squanders. They also blew away a hundred and sixty million of budgetary support from Taiwan—twenty million dollars ever budget year they get from Taiwan. They borrowed millions more from the World Bank, millions more from the IDB, millions more from the CDB; million more from CABEI. And in order to prop up B.T.L., which they had taken over, they raided Social Security funds for another fifty million dollars—fifteen million in addition went to the B.E.L. acquisition. Mister Speaker as the Leader of the Opposition said, the chickens have indeed come home to roost.”

Day one of the budget debate ended shortly after six and continues on Wednesday morning.