REPORT #6 June 1999
HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT ASSIGNMENTS IN BELIZE FOR ESSAYS!


Produced by the Belize Development Trust
In the struggle to understand the principles of political reform in Belize for greater democratization, a small number of things are important.

It is all in the way we structure the political management aspects of our national society, both locally and nationally.

It is the natural thing, for tyrants to wish to consolidate and centralize. Thereby increasing their individual control and power. The unnatural thing is democracy, in which you do the opposite; which is to disperse power and management functions. The World Bank, the United Nations and all those International Symposiums can talk forever about how third world countries do not really have either technical, or financial problems. But what they have is inadequate political structure problems. It is one thing to know, and another thing to correct and re-design for great economic effectiveness and individual liberties.

In Belize, the principles of further democratization are basic. How do you re-design the political structure and amend the Constitution to achieve certain things?

1) How do you give most power to representation by population?

2) How do you give a check and balance to representation by population by including a mechanism of geographic representation by six districts?

3) In other words, how do you make population representation, equal to geographic district representation, as a check and balance? Equal rights so to speak, at the national level of government?

4) How do you confine national government to national issues, agreed upon by both population representation, but also six district geographic representation? For the national government represents the consensus of ALL the country, not just population centers.

5) How do you give an equal power at National level of government, between the voices of scattered rural farmers and small communities and villages, as a check and balance, to the overwhelming population of the towns and larger population centers? So as not to distort the economic growth of the nation?

6) How do you give local autonomy and sovereign powers by geographic district, in which the rural inhabitants and smaller communities have a mechanism to give them an equal voice to the population centers and townies of that district? In other words, how do you stop a district from being represented by population centers as to development and national revenue sharing and future plans of development? How do you provide a district political structure in which the rural inhabitants of a district have an equal check and balance, with the population centers of the townies of that district? Yet any tax revenue is shared possibly in some fields by population, but in others by rural needs?

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