REPORT #6 June 1999
HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT ASSIGNMENTS IN BELIZE FOR ESSAYS!
Produced by the Belize
Development Trust
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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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