Video footage obtained by News 5 shows a group of young men playing basketball in the dark at the St John’s Primary School court on Euphrates Avenue in Belize City.
The footage captured on Thursday shows the players with barely enough light to see the hoop. It has raised concerns over the lack of properly equipped community facilities.
The group is now appealing for lighting so they can safely use the court at night. Residents, businesses and organisations able to install or fund lighting for the court are being urged to come forward.
The request comes weeks after the closure of the Leadership Intervention Unit’s jobs programme, which cut off opportunities for some young people in the area. With that programme gone, the basketball court remains one of the few structured outlets left for youths in the community, according to residents.
Once a source of income for hundreds of participants, the LIU was halted a few weeks ago. At the time, Prime Minister John Briceño defended the decision to put a pause on the initiative as the right one.
“This was never an employment agency,” Briceño said in a June interview. “LIU was simply to hold you for about three months and then say okay for you to go elsewhere.” He pointed to the nearly $18 million dollars spent on the programme, arguing the money is better redirected into sports programmes and after-school activities. “We could keep these kids in school so that they don’t go down that route,” he said.
Meanwhile, Pickstock Area Representative Anthony Mahler, who also serves as Minister of Youths, backed the halt. “I think it is good to take a pause and reevaluate any program to see the merits of it. I support an LIU program. How that looks we will have to sit in Cabinet and re-evaluate it. But me as minister of youths, I often question how can you be spending six million dollars on five hundred and eighty-three man when seventy percent of the population is under the age of twenty-nine and the youth budget is only two point seven million dollars, or three million dollars, somewhere around there,” Mahler said in a June interview.
