And while his Ministers will reflexively defend decisions of their maximum leader - putting an elected representative back in charge of the Ministry of Natural Resources marks a sea-change for the Prime Minister. Steadily - but with little success - since 2015 he’s been trying to remove the political taint from a ministry which in 2013 he famously described as a hotbed of corruption. These are his remarks captured on cell phone camera in Los Angeles speaking to an audience of Belizean Americans:…
Rt. Hon. Dean Barrow, Prime Minister
"I believe that the lands department unfortunately is another hot bed of corruption."
That was 2013, and after the election in November 2015, Barrow did the unthinkable: he removed his Deputy Prime Minister Gaspar Vega from that ministry. He replaced him with Senator Godwin Hulse, followed by Senator Vanessa Retreage, followed by Dr. Carla Barnett.
As he explained in December 2016 when Retreage left the powerful post after just a few months, he was trying to turn things around:
Rt. Hon. Dean Barrow (December 13, 2016)
"I regret greatly that Vanessa can't give us a long stint. But as I say I won't be greedy. I think ultimately we're going to end up in a place where we will be able to demonstrate without fear of contradiction to the Belizean people that that lands department has been turned around.”
Since then, after 18 months with Dr. Carla Barnett at the helm - it’s safe to say that transformation has not been achieved. The Ministry indeed may be less rife with corruption - but administratively - there are still major bottlenecks in the bureaucracy to perform straightforward tasks. Now that the control of the Ministry is going back to an elected politician - we’ll see what comes next.
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