And, moving unto other political news - today the Prime Minister went to the Government House in Belize City to sign the condolence book for Queen Elizabeth the Second. We'll talk to him about that later, but, first we asked him about the recent resignation of statistical analyst Martin Aldana from the re-districting task force.
As we have reported, Aldana resigned at the end of August - saying the re-districting exercise has been politicized and that the process - which should be independent - was being influenced by "outside actors."
And while Aldana was independently hired by the Elections and Boundaries Department for his known body of work as a statistician, today, the Prime Minister flipped the script - and suggested that Aldana had a political agenda:
Hon. John Briceno, Prime Minister Of Belize
"There were political outsiders indeed, um, um, trying to push the process towards their agenda and that was from the opposition. Everybody knows that he and Mr August are very close and the recommendations that he was doing we found it very cute that it was the PUP divisions that he wanted to get rid of and since he has already made it public, um, it was so, um for him now to resign and to use that as an excuse I think is disappointing because we have not been interfering with the process and it's unfortunate that we have to politicize everything but you know he has decided that he wants to resign then we need to respect that we want to move on and now we are getting one of the professionals from SIB, a statistician from the statistical institute of Belize, who that person is I don't know."
We did ask Alberto August about his alleged close relationship with Martin Aldana. He said, quote, "Nothing can be further from the truth. "I have never, in my life, met Martin Aldana, much less know him as the Prime Minister falsely stated."
