“It is simply that the Government in its corruption, waste, and ineptitude has dug itself too deep a hole, has imprisoned itself too fixedly in entanglements of its creditors and the international financial institutions. Without their seal of approval, this government could not even have survived for another year. These policy-based loans that we hear so much about Madam Speaker are being doled out one portion at a time. And to keep these life raft monies coming, the government is in fact a prisoner of the policy dictates, the enforced austerities, the barebones capital spending and the accompanying prescriptions for mass suffering, all these things have been visited on our poor Belize by the I.F.I.’s. That is why there is and can be no salary increase in this budget for the long suffering public officers. And they, in the face of the most cruel and punitive inflation rates since Independence have had their wages frozen for years now, even as a creeping retrenchment continues to decimate their ranks. That is why despite the new found oil money there is and can be no elimination of the revenue replacement duty on fuel so that the pump price to the consumer can fall and give people a break and so that the entire economy may be stimulated. That is why Madam Speaker there is and can be no tax relief for the masses even as the cost of the living jumped exponentially and the areas hardest hit were the very basics of rent, water, and power. That is why in this budget as Gloria Steinem once put it, “There is no there, there.” Nothing for single mothers and youth at risk, nothing for the warring street gangs that sublimate their frustration on the nihilistic violence that we have been seeing, nothing for the workers, nothing for the unemployed, nothing for the small farmers, nothing for the small entrepreneurs, nothing for the students, housewives, and school children.”

“This almost unimaginable contraction of crippling mega debt by this administration was not for any purposes of true national development, poverty alleviation, infrastructural development, education, health, tax relief, or personal improvements in the quality of life for the Belizean citizens. No Madam Speaker! Instead it was, as with all the millions realised from the sale of our national assets, instead this huge contraction of burdensome unmanageable debt was principally for the self aggrandisement of ministers and their families and their friends; the enrichment of their cronies such as the Novelos, Glenn Godfrey and Papi Pena and Bill Lindo and Arturo Lizarraga and Haisam Diab. The debt monies were spent on Intelco and Galleria Maya and San Lorenzo and Los Lagos and Mahogany Heights. The debt monies were spent as compensation for property owned by ministers and their drivers and their wives and their uncles and acquired by this Government for millions more than they were worth.”

“We had to default! With all that means, Belize had first to default before there could be any question of restructuring. Together with the default there was this certification that we were so completely bereft of any ability to pay, that as the I.M.F., as the I.F.I.’s were telling the creditors, you noh have no choice, you better take what you can get, otherwise you will get nothing.”