Will Public Service Reform Deliver Real Savings?

Belize’s public sector wage bill is eating up a third of government spending, and now the Briceño administration wants to borrow eight million U.S. dollars to help bring it under control. The loan, from the Inter-American Development Bank, is being framed as a major investment in modernizing the civil service, from better workforce planning to digital transformation and stronger institutional systems.

 

Prime Minister John Briceño

“With this project it will help us to do better. as people are retiring you wont bring people back and that is how you control retrenching. But, the truth f the matter is that the public service is like a pear, you have a small top and the bottom is big. So the challenge you have is that almost every ministry is telling you they need more people, more technical people and the people at the bottom don’t have any technical expertise and that is the challenge. So we need to put something in place whereby we could move this thing form politicians to this is my friend and my voter, give them a job. We are under tremendous pressure from our people saying you did not go in there and fire the UDP like the UDP did in 2008. You know what the former prime minister said, to the winner the spoils, that is what he said in the National Assembly. We could have taken the pandemic to let go a lot of people. We were told by the IMF to let go about three thousand people. But we did not, because I don’t think it is fair. I don’t think it is fair to take advantage of people that are barely making a living. We want to deal, deal with the ig guys, but not the people out there. But we feel different. Despite all of that, we are under pressure from our people. So we need to find a system to minimize that kind of thing and bring back that independence that the public service had before independent and even after the first years after independence where it was completely independent service, public service, that can truly provide the service expected from them.”

 

But while Prime Minister John Briceño says the reform is necessary, Opposition Leader Tracy Panton is asking the obvious question: will Belizeans actually see measurable results? Minister of Public Service Henry Charles Usher says the project is about moving the public service deeper into the twenty-first century.

 

Attention readers: This online newscast is a direct transcript of our evening television broadcast. When speakers use Kriol, we have carefully rendered their words using a standard spelling system.

 

Watch the full newscast here: