Caribbean Shores’ Kareem Musa Says Budget is a “Trainwreck”

Kareem Musa

The debate begins this Thursday in the House with the budget rebuttal by the Leader of the Opposition, John Briceño.  The P.U.P. Area Representative Kareem Musa will also go on record in the House of Representatives sometime over the next two days, debating specific points in respect of the 2017 budget.  Musa has publicly criticized the annual financial plan as nothing more than the vestiges of a massive train wreck.  According to the junior parliamentarian, the Barrow administration has been on a collision course since 2009.  That dangerous track, he says, all came to a head with the extravagant spending of the Petrocaribe monies over the past three years.

Kareem Musa, Area Representative, Caribbean Shores

“This is a train wreck.  That is what it is.  It is the debris after a train wreck and all of us as Belizeans are standing around the debris looking at it.  Essentially the train that Mr. Barrow has been driving over the last eight years was an unsustainable one that can only be characterized by wasteful spending of the people’s money and I speaking specifically of the Petrocaribe spending over the last three and a half years.  Some three hundred and fifty million dollars.  I’m speaking specifically about the five hundred and sixty million dollars that he paid for BTL and if you listen to Mr. Barrow still blaming the PUP over a Super Bond when the payments for that Super Bond is only fifty million a year, twenty-five million U.S. [dollars], but in just two years Isani, but in just two years, he spent almost one billion on dollars on Petrocaribe spending which has no accountability whatsoever.  If you call the month before the general elections of 2015, Mr. Barrow brought another supplementary to the House where he spent forty million dollars.  And you know what that said, the kind of accounting they are delivering to the people of Belize?  They said for flood relief.  That is it, it doesn’t say if it is for sand, if it is for houses, how much material, which contractors, none of that sort of accounting that you would expect from a responsible government was provided and has never been provided.”