Has Police Minister ‘failed’ his Ministry on guaranteeing citizen security? Lack of resources may be to blame, says Opposition Leader

By Aaron Humes: There is no love lost between Leader of the Opposition Moses “Shyne” Barrow and Minister of Home Affairs Kareem Musa on the issue of crime, with the former regularly calling for the head of the latter.

During his Budget response on Wednesday, however, while Barrow repeated that Musa had “failed” in his mandate, he granted that perhaps it is resources that are the problem: “And the Minister of Police does not have a sufficient budget [to] deal with the problems that he has. Madam Speaker. They have tied his hands behind his back. Madam Speaker, it is difficult for me to say he is incompetent or is being sabotaged by his own government.”

He continued, “When the Opposition Leader at the time and his Police Shadow Minister, the now minister, police had regular press conferences, always criticized and they said that they had a common-sense solution to arresting crime. We are still waiting. This budget does not present that. The member from Caribbean shores is still being sabotaged by his government.”

With eight persons murdered in the last week alone, not to mention other major crimes, morale within the Police apparatus and confidence outside is at an “all-time low”, said Barrow, which is not good news for Belize’s tourism product according to the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) recent consultation, and nothing in the Budget “comes anywhere close” to a solution, nor does the National Security Council (NSC) headed by the Prime Minister, speak up.

We’ll have Musa’s response in a separate story.

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