Deputy P.M. Briceño calls U.D.P. land distribution criminal
It was downright dull in the House of Representatives this morning until the Deputy Prime Minister Johnny Briceño introduced an amendment to the National Lands Act which would allow the Minister to delegate his powers to a subordinate, namely for the signing of documents which now require his signature. The move is intended to alleviate the bottleneck in the Ministry of Lands, and although the Leader of the Opposition Dean Barrow supported the initiative in principle, he took the opportunity to denounce the cancellation of land leases by the government. The D.P.M., however, lashed back against the previous United Democratic Party government, and former Minister of Lands “Dito” Juan. For an unsuspecting audience, Briceño’s comeback was House of Reps theatre at its finest.
Dean Barrow, Leader of the Opposition, U.D.P.
“In terms of the particular function of delegation that this act contemplates, I don’t have a difficulty with that. I hope that the person that the Minister appoints will be less bloodthirsty than others in the Minister’s ministry. If some sanity will now be brought to this process, we will applaud that but nothing can ever make up for the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of lives that have been destroyed by the wholesale cancellation of leases engaged in by this government.”
Johnny Briceño, Minister of Natural Resources
“Madame Speaker, I sometimes wonder where the Leader of the Opposition was over the past five years when they were in Government. Because if he was so concerned about these things why did he not do something about the previous Minister of Natural Resources Dito Juan. When you look at the record of the plague that that man did to the patrimony of this country, he should be in jail. That is what he should have been doing.
Just before the elections in this country he gave away acres of prime land in the cayes, including himself, selling those lands for less than fifty dollars an acre – prime land in front of the beach. That is what they did. He has land in Mountain Pine Ridge again that he sold to himself for a pittance.
When we look at what happened in Georgeville where the then government acquired a hundred and fifty acres of land at a cost of more than half a million dollars for village expansion and the then Minister of Lands took ninety acres of that land for himself, Madame Speaker I wonder where the Leader of the Opposition was at that time.
When we look at the Caribbean Shores area, every piece of land was given to U.D.P. cronies, land that was sold for one thousand five hundred dollars. If you were to go into that area, that very same land is being sold anywhere between thirty to sixty thousand dollars. That is what the U.D.P. did over the last five years.
And the worse case Madame Speaker, that we can cite today, is the land that the U.D.P. gave themselves, free, not one single cent, that land that is valued at over six hundred thousand dollars that they gave themselves over at the BelChina Bridge so that they could build their U.D.P. Headquarters. That is what we want to stop Madame Speaker. Where was the learned Leader of the Opposition when that was taking place? He should have done something about that.
Presently this government, under our Prime Minister, we are going to fix that. That is why we’re setting up a National Lands Advisory Committee and we will also include the Opposition. The only person I will not accept is Dito Juan.”
