Said Musa
Said Musa was prime minister of Belize from August 1998 to February 2008, the lawyer of Palestinian descent who took the People's United Party from George Price, the father of the nation. He won two elections with the largest majorities the country had seen, twenty-six seats of twenty-nine in 1998 and twenty-two in 2003. He lost the third to Barrow by the same margin the other way after the debt and the scandals had done their work. He was born in San Ignacio, the son of a Palestinian immigrant from Jerusalem and a Belizean mother. He read law at Manchester, was called to the bar at Gray's Inn, and came home in 1967. He founded the United Black Association for Development's newspaper with Evan Hyde, and joined Price's party in 1974. He was attorney-general and then education and foreign minister in the governments of the 1980s, including the one that took the country to independence in 1981. He took the party in 1996 when Price retired. The ten years were the borrowing. The growth of the first term was paid for with the Development Finance Corporation's loans and the government's guarantees. The debt tripled to a billion dollars, eighty per cent of output. The Social Security Board's funds went into the party's friends' projects. The state telephone company was sold to the Ashcroft group and taken back and sold again. The restructuring of 2007 was the first of the country's defaults. There were the free-trade and the tourism that made the cays, and the hurricanes Keith in 2000 and Iris in 2001. There was the Guatemalan claim referred, at last, toward the International Court of Justice in the agreement of 2008. There were the government's own ministers resigning in 2004 over the DFC and the pension fund. That was the beginning of the end. He lost the election of February 2008 by twenty-five seats to six. He was charged the same year with the theft of ten million dollars of Venezuelan aid diverted to a hospital's private debts, and acquitted in 2010 when the prosecution's case collapsed. He sat in the House for Fort George until 2020, when he retired after forty-one years as its member. His son Yasser was a minister in Briceño's government. The party he led is the government again. That is the thing about small countries.
- Lived: 1944 CE – ?
- Nationality: Belizean
- Roles: prime minister, lawyer, politician
