Fonseca says no more gross inefficiencies

A billion dollars in debt, but G.O.B. says there’s opportunity in the midst of disaster. On Thursday night’s One on One, Minister of Budget Planning, Ralph Fonseca, declared that the impact of three hurricanes in four years, coupled with the September eleventh attack has posed serious problems for the country, but by rectifying gross inefficiencies and diversifying the economy, Belize can bounce back.

Ralph Fonseca, Minister of Budget Planning

“What we’re asking the officers to do along with us, is to look at your cost and look at what you’re getting out of it. Does it make sense? As you mention, utilities, how is it that you have a department that’s paying an electricity bill and that building doesn’t even exist anymore, or you’re not renting it anymore? Why is it that you’re paying for a telephone that you don’t have? Why are you leaving on your air conditioning? Simple things like that with millions of dollars that can be saved. And then the relationship with the ministries, why do you have two finance officer when you only need one. Why do you have admin officers? Why don’t take that finance officer and put him over here where you need more efficiency, or maybe as an internal auditor et cetera. That’s the type of moving around that we’re taking about to be more efficient. It’s something, as you know, we’ve had on the conversation for the last three years. We’ve being hoping that people would do it voluntarily, now, we have to buckle down. And again, this is an opportunity coming out of these disasters, because certainly everybody is more focussed in the fact that we must be more efficient.

In the case of the domestic capital budget, we’ll make sure that the budget is directed towards number one, dealing with the problem in the south, as a high priority and the dealing with those areas that need a bit of help in order to get their economic generators going. And then of course, to continue ongoing projects but as efficiently as possible. So a lot of the projects that were maybe projects that could wait for a year or two, will be put in the back burner and those funds will be reallocated, instead of taking on more debt. Because as you know, we went to the markets last year and we raised some one hundred billion dollars, that’s why our debt position was fairly high. But we know we’re going to have problems this year. We didn’t know we’ll have the amounts of problems that we have, but we know that he said that the U.S. economy was turning down, we know that markets were going to be erratic. So we moved in the last quarter of last year to take on some one hundred million dollars that we put into savings, that thank goodness we did it. We’ve been able to deal with the situation today and we’re very liquid. And we’ll continue to go forward, but we have to be even more efficient now.”