9 days ago, Novelo's, Belize's only national bus carrier shut down. And while it was no paradise while Novelo's was running, since then, commuters have been forced to learn to cope with a state of sustained randomness and uncertainty, kept to only a modicum of order by the Department of Transport upon whose slender shoulders has fallen the heavy burden of coordinating, managing and overseeing the National Transport Service. So when will it end? Well, according to our sources the receivers, the DFC and the Atlantic Bank continue to have negotiations with the Novelo brothers, reportedly to buy over the debt. Yesterday in the National Assembly, Opposition Leader Dean Barrow said they're buying DFC's debt at a significantly marked down price, meaning a loss to taxpayers. Barrow called it a disaster.
Hon. Dean Barrow,
"The bulk of the transportation routes in this country, ground transportation routes, the bulk were being serviced by Novelo's Bus Line. There is now a collapse and we cannot hear from government what is the plan. There has been a kind of makeshift scramble to fill the void, it hasn't been well filled, and on top of that school reopens, I believe next week, or at least the week after. What is to happen in those circumstances? Why is the government not telling us, the House and the Belizean people, what it is going to do?
Madam Speaker in the absence of hard information from them, I was scandalized to learn that it appears the plan is that the Novelo Brothers, who owned Novelo's Bus Line, if it is true, that the plan is despite the fact that there's going to be all kinds of chaos, as there now is, during the period of lag, if the plan is to give them control of the routes that belonged formally to them when they had Novelo's Bus Line and which were passed to Atlantic Bank to DFC, something has to be radically wrong with that notion. Is there not something wrong, is there not something sick with an arrangement that will see, as I understand it, the government allowing the Novelo brothers to buy out their own debt from DFC?
If Atlantic Bank wanted to pay 35 cents on the dollar, the Novelo brothers will obviously pay that or less, but it appears that government is prepared to agree to this. So these same people, who apart from everything else, could not manage a national transportation network are being given, it appears, the same opportunity all over again, minus the 20 million dollars or whatever it is that will come off the 30 million debt they owe which will not be repaid.
Madam Speaker this has to be madness. This government, there is utter and complete responsibility for the loss now of those three hundred and eighteen jobs from the receivership, for the fact that there's this huge void in ground transportation that there's this crisis that people have to stand in the sun and the rain to try and catch buses, that every little pirate or jitney is jumping in now to try and fill the void with no question of standards; it is a shambles. This government is responsible completely for wreckage with which we are now trying to deal and this government will on top of that, it appears, also turn around and bless those who have left the Belizean people in the lurch as well for $30 million. This side of the House cries absolute shame on them Madam Speaker."
In his response, Minister Coye referred obliquely to a transport master plan that he plans to unveil in no set time frame. According to our information, government is moving to cancel the road service permits that have been abandoned by Novelo's the receiver. Those permits had been fully paid up to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars in November.
