By Horace Palacio:
Every September the drums come out, the flags climb the poles, and the speeches soar. And every September, somewhere beneath the bunting, a quiet question waits that nobody at the podium will touch.
What, exactly, are we celebrating?
This year, our forty fifth, I intend to answer it honestly, and I warn you now, the answer will not match the fireworks.
Begin with a distinction every adult understands in private life. There is a difference between an anniversary and an achievement. A birthday marks the fact that time passed and you survived it. An accomplishment marks the fact that you did something with the time. A wise person marks the first quietly and celebrates the second loudly. A nation that confuses the two ends up throwing its biggest party for its smallest feat, the feat of the calendar turning, while the actual report card sits unread in the drawer.
So this September, let us read the report card aloud, over the sound of the marching bands, subject by subject, using nothing but the documented record of this single year.
The lights. On the night of August 25, at 7:28, the entire country went dark because Mexico’s grid hiccupped and our own generation could summon only 103 megawatts against a 122 megawatt peak. Load shedding is now part of our national vocabulary, with published notices telling communities which evenings the darkness visits them. Our Prime Minister personally asked a foreign president not to switch us off. Forty five years after independence, our independence cannot survive an evening without the neighbor’s permission. Grade that subject yourself.
The ledger. This year’s numbers showed Belize importing well over a billion dollars in goods against barely 140 million exported, and the budget speech itself confessed that our current account deficit widened from 3.5 to 5 percent of GDP as exports contracted across almost every category. Forty five years on, we remain a nation that buys ten and sells one, celebrating sovereignty with borrowed foreign exchange.
The purse. The government’s own budget, the largest in our history at 1.9 billion dollars, projects a deficit of 110 million, nearly triple what was projected the year before, requiring a quarter billion in fresh financing, while 60 cents of every recurrent dollar goes to wages and pensions before a single road is paved. The one shining fiscal achievement of this era, the great debt climb-down this column praised, is precisely the discipline now visibly loosening.
The table. A distant war doubled the landed cost of our fuel, diesel wears the crown at the pump, the COPA line crawled onto every light bill, and the minimum wage month remains longer than its 975 dollars. The mothers marking this September bought the parade uniforms in Melchor, because the border is where Belizean money stretches.
The trust. This was the year of payments split beneath thresholds, of ministers on paid leave, of whistleblowers left naked without a law, of a procurement portal still living in a speech. Forty five years of sovereignty, and the citizens still cannot see their own treasury’s contracts.
And the exits. Ask the graduating classes marching this September where they see themselves in five years, and count how many answers contain a foreign city.
That is the report card, and not one line of it is opinion. Every entry carries a document number.
Now picture the split screen of the twenty first itself, because the day stages its own editorial. On one side of the street, the floats, the anthems, the ministers waving. On the other side, one block over, a generator hums on standby behind the stage in case Mexico fails the fireworks. The student marching with the flag is marching, statistically, toward a visa. The vendor selling patriotic trinkets counted her light bill twice this morning. The country is not celebrating its condition. It is celebrating despite its condition, and there is a name for festivities used that way. Anesthesia.
Let me be scrupulously fair before the close, because this column deals in whole ledgers. There are true entries on the credit side of forty five years. The debt was cut nearly in half from its 2020 peak, a genuine feat. Free secondary education now reaches 95 percent of government school students. Not one acre of this territory has been lost, and power has changed hands peacefully at every single election while our neighbors bled through those same decades. These are real, and I have honored each of them in this column. But weigh them honestly against the drawer full of failing subjects, and then note the cruelest detail of all, that the flagship credit, the fiscal discipline, is the very line item now sliding backward. A nation celebrating at forty five on the strength of achievements that are themselves dimming is a man toasting his health with his doctor’s warning letter in his pocket.
So hear my conclusion precisely, because it will be twisted otherwise. I am not calling for the parade to be cancelled. The flag is innocent. The children marching are innocent. And the generation of 1981 earned their September honestly, with sacrifice this column has chronicled. The crime is not the celebration. The crime is the substitution, the use of the party as a stand-in for the performance, year after year, until the drums themselves become a way of not hearing the report card. Price’s generation earned their September twenty first. Ours has been renting it, annually, on credit.
Which means the most patriotic act available this September is to refuse to be comforted. March if you wish. Wave the flag, it belongs to you. But march angry. March with the report card folded in your pocket. Let every minister on every float see in the crowd’s eyes that the anesthesia has worn off.
Because here is what a September worth celebrating would actually look like, and every reader of this column knows the list by heart. A September at the end of a year when the lights never went out. When the export line finally climbed. When the deficit shrank instead of tripling. When the contracts sat on a public portal and the whistleblower had a law at his back. When the graduating class answered the five-year question with a Belizean address.
Give this country one September like that, and you will not need to organize the celebration.
You will need to organize the crowd control.
Until then, the drums each twenty first are keeping time for a promise, not a performance.
Forty five years is old enough to know the difference.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author, Horace Palacio, and do not necessarily reflect the views or editorial stance of Breaking Belize News.
The post The forbidden question of September, what exactly are we celebrating appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.
By Horace Palacio: Every September the drums come out, the flags climb the poles, and the speeches soar. And every September, somewhere beneath the bunting, a quiet question waits that nobody at the podium will touch. What, exactly, are we celebrating? This year, our forty fifth, I intend to answer it honestly, and I warn
The post The forbidden question of September, what exactly are we celebrating appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.