By: Omar Silva I Editor/Publisher

National Perspective Belize – Digital 2025

www.natioalperspectivebz.com

Belize City: Thursday 24th April 2025

🪓 Editorial:

When a nation’s entire economic vision is built around money it does not generate, budgets become fantasy documents. And now, as the Briceño Administration enters its fifth month of the 2025 calendar year without presenting the national budget, it is clear: Belize has no backbone.

Not in its economy. Not in its fiscal planning. And certainly not in its political leadership.

This government has spoken endlessly about Plan Belize and its upgraded sequel, Plan Belize 2.0, as if simply naming a policy is enough to birth a future. But when the linchpin of that plan — a US$125 million grant from the now-defunct Millennium Challenge Corporation — disappears overnight, it exposes the rotting foundation we’ve been standing on for decades: dependency.

For too long, Belize has been ruled by politicians who govern as middlemen for foreign money. They do not build; they broker. They do not create; they wait. Every grand project, every reform, every spark of transformation is prefaced by “when the funding comes in.”

And now, the funding is gone. The MCC is dead. The global tariff wall is rising. The budget is missing. And the people are once again left to pay the price.

Let us call this what it is — not an economic setback, but a national embarrassment.

What kind of government, five years into its term, cannot present a functioning budget by the start of a new fiscal year?

What kind of nation, 43 years after political independence, still pegs its economy to a single foreign currency, imports almost everything it consumes, and relies on U.S. grants to fix its most basic sectors?

The answer: a nation still colonized in practice, if not in name. A nation trapped in a political loop controlled by an extractive class, which wears blue or red depending on the season, but always feeds from the same trough of external dependency.

Enough is enough.

Belize must now wake up to this economic nightmare and realize: we cannot budget for the future if we don’t own the present.

We need:

• A complete break from aid-dependent fiscal thinking
• Investment in local production, regional trade, and currency resilience
• An industrial policy grounded in national interest, not foreign appeasement
• A political system that punishes passivity and rewards innovation

The time has come for the Belizean people to stop hoping for grants and start demanding economic justice and political accountability.

Let this be the final time a budget is held hostage by Washington, and the last time a government is allowed to bluff its way through fiscal chaos with empty optimism.

The age of dependency is over. If we do not act now, there may be no Belizean future left to plan for.

PLAN BELIZE 2.0