There is a worrying failure to come up with a plan factoring in short, medium and long-term modules to address the problem. If we wait another five years, we will have to convert the Belize Defence Force into a law enforcement agency since the greater threat to national security will be a purely home-grown, internal threat.

The admission exposes that awful irony of governance so black and thick it could be pumped out of the ground like Belizean crude. Seventy cents out of every dollar of revenue earned by government goes to pay the salaries of public officers who, we are now told, are incapable of carrying out a development agenda.