Mark Wignall | Why so jittery, JLP?

I was never quite comfortable when the prime minister’s wife was made Speaker of the House in September 2023. To be clear, it wasn’t a moment that earned any special applause and, the way I figured it, it was not something that ticked off the thoughts of the typical voter. So, I was basically neutral on it.

The Jamaica Labour Party’s (JLP’s) management of multiple matters during COVID-19 and Holness’ presence and leadership were enough to carry me over from the end of 2020 to 2023, just before the time when minor faults of the JLP grew into bigger ones and faults that were never seen suddenly appeared on the radar. We know it as the time when the mid-term focus becomes a season of bitter fault finding and the party in power fails at widening its platform of workable solutions.

In hindsight, Mrs Holness had no need to add Speaker of the House to her CV. Last Tuesday the government members walked out during the Budget presentation by Opposition Leader Mark Golding. It came at a time when Golding was questioning the wisdom of Mrs Holness as Speaker of the House.

The first word that jumps out at me that quite fittingly describes the government move is petulant. I may have only suspected it before. Now I have proof. A general reading of the vote from February 26 is one where the JLP ended up with painful electoral barbs and hardly any medicine to ease the pain. It has not been fully dealt with and the barbs have transformed into highly uncomfortable political nails.

If the JLP wanted to play the political bamboozle game and do it skilfully, it should have waited until the prime minister give his presentation on Thursday, the day I write this column. In the finest tradition of parliamentary oratory, the speechwriters could have given Mr Holness a gift to intellectually weaken the Opposition leader. Rather than walk out, the JLP could have waited for its turn to rebut Mr Golding and responded, in more lofty tones than before, by stating that the JLP is focusing on economic development and growth, prosperity in workable terms, crime reduction, and so on.

Now, of course, it has lost that opportunity. If anything, the JLP has brought added focus of the role of Speaker of the House and the fact that the lady has been sitting on important reports that are deserving of sharing with the public. Transparency is missing. Is the PM and the PM’s wife who is Speaker of the House OK with that?

WHAT OF POLITICAL AUTOPSY

A worst-case scenario for the JLP, which expected much more than was delivered on February 26, is that nothing workable and achievable in, say, six months is likely to happen. In other words, it is doomed from here on. But no political party can even internalise that as a likelihood. That would be death by a thousand cuts.

On the other hand, if the JLP has already identified political fixes to enable the JLP to flex its political muscle six months from now and hold the pose long enough to gain it electoral traction, then it ought to go for it.

It seems to me that the party which walked out of Parliament over biting criticism from the other side would be the entity advertising that its political flesh is weak and it is ready for its electoral bones to be scattered over 63 constituencies when next they meet.

That is not the message that the JLP wanted to convey. So far, it doesn’t seem as if the autopsy has been done. Instead, it seems as if it is making sure that JLP rigour mortis has firmly set in all over. Wrong move, JLP.

CATCHING AT THE RIGHT TIME

His shirt says, Red Hills Primary School as he removes the keys from his mother’s car. He goes to a side grille and uses the appropriate keys. But he has to do a bit of climbing for the top lock. Then he swings the metal doors out of the way. Another key and he is in the small wooden shop. He opens two windows then the main door.

Everything around him is much bigger than him but he has a job to do helping his mother before he is taken to school. About eight people are at the shop before the ‘little man’ all six years old does his morning chores.

“I can run the shop by myself but I have to stand on a box in the shop,” he says to me as he serves a $30 bag juice and a spice bun to a young mother trying to juggle her way through another day.

A young man in a fit of mental decline enters the shop. ‘If you not buying anything, don’t crowd di shop,’ says the six-year-old man. The young man sneers and backpedals his way out.

Another young man, “Mi late fi work. A $200 bag and a boom an rum.” The mother serves. “Gimme $20 grabba to.”

People in, people out, dollars on the counter, poor people juggling, soap powder to bubble, cigarette to suck on, the mother who lost her baby and six months later she has no idea how. Autopsy? Another mystery. She reminds me. We must talk about it.

“Mi want it inna newspaper,” she says. Nervousness grips me. Expectations?

Many are already parked in their ways and mode of hustlings but the little man, all six years of him, is already seeing the light ahead.

“Whole heap a work up here but some a di man dem lazy,” he says.

“How old did you say you were?” I ask him again.

His mother leaves a female relative in the shop and drives away with him. To school, to hope, for a chance at a better life.

Mark Wignall is a political and public affairs analyst. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and mawigsr@gmail.com.