First, with regard to Nigel’s this morning in Belize Unboxed,

1) We understand that the commissioner had begun to address the issue of illegal settlement within the buffer zone at Harmonyville, but could you tell us the progress on this situation? Where does it stand now? What needs to be done next and by whom?

2) How soon will you be able to sign the documents pertaining to phase 5 and 6 of Harmonyville? Is there some hold up in this regard? Please explain so that if there’s a problem perhaps we the community can help to somehow expedite.

3) What prevents the lands department from hiring an assistant to the cashier at the Belmopan lands office? Is it a money issue? If so what’s the salary requirement? With this knowledge perhaps we the community could help foot the bill since this is an issue that affects all of us, if only because the facilitating tax payments is good for the economy.

4) Nigel is inviting you to come out to Harmony day this weekend. Do you have any prior engagements? If it’s with your family I’m sure Nigel and the members of Harmonyvillle would be pleased to have them as well.

Secondly, a few months ago, myself and new comrades from the lsw, after one Public Discourse on Land Reform, realizing that we had the capability amongst ourselves to develop the type of e-government application for the lands department that could:

• modernize & normalize the land procurement process,
• allowing documents to be submitted online,
• reduce fraud,
• drastically reduce the cost of all land transactions,
• increase access of the general public to land services, and
• most importantly increase transparency, which in turn would
• decrease corruption and, equally detrimental, the perception of corruption,

reached out to your department and were advised that the lands department data was already digitized but was ‘confidential’.

Therefore, my questions to you are these:

5) Why would government land sales and related transactions be confidential? Shouldn’t all public information be publicly accessible?

7) If it is not confidential, whom might we contact about obtaining online access to the database?

About 3 years ago, the IDB gave Belize a 2.9 million dollar loan for the development of the type of system described here. If good use is already being made (albeit painstakingly slowly) of that loan, and the development of the applications is already underway,

8) Couldn’t we make even better use of the loan by turning this into into an open source project? We complain that Belize lack financial resources to do many things, yet we systematically waste those resources that are abundantly available to us. The members of the public service are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to our country’s human resources. Hesitation to ‘crowd source’ will only stunt our national growth. We’d really like to help so and trust that you will take the time to explore this crowd sourcing idea further.

Were these issues not of dire concern to the nation at large and had these issues not been pending already for far too long, I would not suggest this. It would be an efficient way to handle a lot of pending issues so I hope you’ll make the time.

Alternatively, if you prefer, please email us at Ombudsman@BelizeUnboxed.com with basic responses to questions above and let us know when in the next 2 weeks, you might be able to meet with us in a public web space and I’d be most humbly delighted to re-organize.

Thanks in advance and kind regards,