What if they discovered that their government is actually dependent on Taiwan to balance its budget; on Cuba for doctors and nurses to provide health care in remote areas; on the US for donations of boats to patrol its own territorial waters; on annual free scholarships from Cuba, Taiwan, Mexico to train professionals; on Venezuela to house the poor; on donations of musical instruments from roving ambassadors to provide music in schools; on Mexico to build its theatre for the performing arts.

The suffocating ignorance is partially attributable – in the phraseology of Jules Vasquez – to an “absence of gatekeepers”. There are no threshold standards to qualify people to hold high public office or to access media instruments that influence public opinion, resulting in the ignorati unbound.

With all that has befallen him at the hands of the PUP, his dignity and pride so mangled and mortified, he could not hope to inspire the ready confidence that he could be Chief Justice for all the people, even if he would be.

The Bar should concern itself less with any perceived intrusion into Conteh’s tenure and more with how quickly this government could lay waste judicial independence, in the name of righteous action.

With the prime minister passing off stale, half-baked dishes from his kitchen Cabinet as nouveau cuisine, should we bother waiting around to taste his anti-crime dessert?

On April Fools’ Day the government enacted a legislative torpedo – the Supreme Court of Judicature Amendment Act – that has blasted a gaping hole through Belize’s regime for foreign investor protection.

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.

Approaching Nyon; next stop Lausanne. Lausanne: headquarters of the International Olympic Committee and known as the Olympic Capital of the world. It is the global centre for sports administration and, of course, the home of the Court of Arbitration for Sports – the CAS – at which Belize has a fateful appointment.

The question the minister must now ask himself is whether the abolition of corporal punishment in schools which he bravely and urgently lead was worth pissing off the unions, damaging his personal reputation and dissipating his government’s rapidly depleting store of good will. For what, a delay of six months?