And while the Briceno administration gets ready to do battle with Brads, the Prime Minister says it's all love with Ramon "Monchi" Cervantez, the Minister of State who was recently re-assigned.
As we told you on Friday, Cervantez leaves the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Immigration and now goes over to the Ministry of Sustainable Development, Climate Change and Disaster Risk Management, along with Orlando Habet.
The opposition has suggested that Cervantez was moved due to less than optimal conduct at the Department of Immigration, but today the Prime Minister deflected for his Orange Walk North representative. He said, it's all about fine tuning Cabinet assignments:
John Briceno, Prime Minister
"Whenever a prime minister makes a change, it does not have to be because of any wrongdoing, it's simply because as prime minister, I have to constantly be looking at the performance of different ministries, and looking at where I can do a better fit. Honorable Monchi Cervantes is one of the most capable persons we have, super intelligent. People don't know this but he sat down for his CPA, Certified Public Accountant exam and he passed it in one sitting, many people have to take it four or five times before they finally pass, he did it in one sitting. I put him with Minister Courtenay because I felt that since he's a new elected representative that he can learn a lot from Minister Courtenay, and Minister Courtenay work very closely together but looking
around we're seeing now that the issue of Climate Change has become a burning topic worldwide and it requires a lot of the attention of Landy Habet. Landy has so much to do with these issues both locally and internationally and he has a fairly big ministry so we felt it was best to move Monchi, one of our more capable ministers of state, and put him to work along with Landy. We have the issue of NEMO, we have to look at the total reorganization, restructuring of NEMO, at this last hurricane, thankfully it was only a category one and it only hit one small area of the country, we saw a lot of deficiencies. We are seeing also that in the Solid Waste Management Authority, that it needs more closer attention, and the same thing with the fire service because since Minister Habet is solely concentrated on these issues, and by the way because of his efforts and the efforts of his CEO, we are potentially raising tens of thousands of free money for Belize under climate change and we felt that it's best to have Monchi to go in there and to assist Minister Habet so that's the only reason, that's the rationale why we made that move."
