Where's the prosperity? - Phillips calls JLP promise a pipe dream
Published:Sunday | January 28, 2018 | 12:00 AMChristopher Serju/Gleaner Writer
Opposition leader Dr Peter Phillips has said that Jamaicans are waking up to the reality that the promise of prosperity on which the governing Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) campaigned in the build-up to the 2016 general elections, when it swept the People's National Party (PNP) from power, was nothing but a pipe dream. He says that this has been evidenced by the JLP's poor management of the economy.
Phillips yesterday used the first meeting of the party's National Executive Council to make the case that the JLP has failed to deliver on its promise of prosperity, for which the country will continue to pay dearly.
"The year has started out with a lot of crime and violence, but we must not be weary in well-doing nor should we ever give up hope.
"I believe that the country is increasingly recognising that we are facing, as a country, a crisis born not just of fate or accident, but a crisis born of the mismanagement of the current Jamaica Labour Party administration," he told Comrades at the Vere Technical High School in Hayes, Clarendon.
"The rate of growth is below what was there in the last period when the PNP was in office. We had nine consecutive months. Not only is growth down, but the growth estimates of the IMF (International Monetary Fund) of what level of growth will be realised over the next three years is down below what it was when the People's National Party administration left office," Phillips declared, even as he steered clear of providing any data in support of this claim.
"Five in four turns out to have been a cruel joke," he said in reference to the Government's strategy to achieve a minimum five per cent growth rate over four years.
Phillips also pointed to the country's fall in the ease-of-doing business ranking, as well as the global perception index, as strong indicators of the country's worsening economic condition under the JLP.