Holness, Phillips wrestle over politicising rotten roads

Leader of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), Andrew Holness, has castigated his detractors for seeking to extract political gain from the state of disrepair of the nation’s roadways.

In his address to thousands of party supporters at the National Arena in Kingston on Sunday, Holness said that roads, some built decades ago, did not fall into disrepair overnight.

“Don’t turn our roadways into a political football. We will make the allocations in this Budget and in the Budget to come to make repairs and improvements to local and secondary roads as far as we can,” Holness, who is also prime minister, said.

“... Sometimes we don’t respond to the manufactured false stories, the politically organised protests, and the biased commentary parading as independent thought,” the prime minister said.

He reminded supporters of the party that the Government has allocated close to $4 billion in the First Supplementary Estimates of Expenditure to deal with the urgent repair of roads.

While conceding that the sum was not enough to rehabilitate all roadways, Holness said that the Government had heard the cries of rural Jamaicans who felt that their corridors had been neglected.

But Opposition Spokesman on Transport and Works Mikael Phillips has taken the prime minister to task for “deflecting the blame from his administration”.

“When you go into a community, you generally don’t find JLP or PNP alone. First, they are Jamaicans, and if they do elect a certain political party, that doesn’t mean that they can’t complain about the bad conditions of their roadway,” he argued.

In a Gleaner interview Sunday, Phillips said that the average $3.5 billion allocated annually in the Budget for road repairs over the last five years was woefully inadequate.

“The Opposition has said on numerous occasions that there has to be a dedicated fund in dealing with the road maintenance,” Phillips insisted, pointing out that central government was unable to maintain the many roads that needed repairs annually.

He said the prime minister should use the “same imagination that he is using to build his own legacy of new roads to maintain the nation’s roadways”.

In his presentation to party faithful on Sunday, the prime minister took aim at those who he said are vested in only telling the bad news.

“There are those who will go out of their way to create false narratives. There are those who go out of their way to plan protests and demonstrations and try to pass them off as organic, and the people see right through it,” Holness said.

Vowing to promote the successes of his administration, the prime minister said the Jamaican economy is fiscally sound, noting that the Government had not imposed any new taxes on the backs of the Jamaican people since the JLP came into power.

“That story is not told; we don’t hear it. We must say it, and when you go back to your communities, you must be the ambassadors of our good news,” Holness told party supporters.

Additionally, he said that the country’s national debt was declining, even as he boasted that Jamaica was the only country in the region that could make the declaration that “after COVID, our debt is trending downwards”.

edmond.campbell@gleanerjm.com