For the past two weeks, a majority of government offices in Belmopan have been without reliable telephone service. That includes key agencies such as the police headquarters and the Western Regional Hospital, both of which have not been able to receive or make calls from their hard lines. When you call in to the listed phone numbers for roughly two thirds of all government departments in Belmopan, the phone simply rings out. But while it sounds like no one's answering, actually the phone is not ringing at those departments. In fact, to reach those offices by phone, your only hope is to have the cell phone number of someone who works there. Within the affected departments, intercom service has also been unreliable.
It's a disastrous state of affairs and the culprit, as we understand it, is the Intelco main switch in the administration building. As you might be able to guess, with no one to call, getting information on exactly what's the problem has been difficult. But according to our information, the main switch is down and requires a part that will take some weeks to reach here.
Of course all this goes back to 2001, when government gave Intelco the 15 year exclusive license to provide telecommunication service for the Government of Belize. It was a maneuver calculated to put a hurting on Michael Ashcroft's BTL and Ashcroft later referred to it derisively as "a pension plan for the boys." Of course, the plan never quite worked out, and the ones left holding the bag are taxpayers and Social Security contributors, because government secretly guaranteed Intelco's private debts with public funds.
And while that's one story, the upshot of the original Intelco license, is that today, 5 years later, government's business must be conducted through the personal cell phones of public officers.
