Sixty main roads and approximately 600 priority roads across 63 constituencies have been identified for rehabilitation under the Government’s $45-billion Shared Prosperity through Accelerated Improvement to Our Road Network (SPARK) programme.
Prime Minister Andrew Holness, who provided an update on SPARK in the House of Representatives on Tuesday, said the programme is set to begin next month.
He told parliamentarians that the Government has followed all the rules and regulations in relation to the implementation of the programme.
Noting that the SPARK was not a patching programme, Holness was at pains to send a message to residents who have become frustrated and, in some instances, vented their anger by blocking roads to protest the deplorable state of the roads.
“For all the Jamaicans who are very frustrated about their roads, who are protesting, who are demonstrating, we hear you, we understand. We drive on these roads, too. We are not pretending as if there is no bad road,” Holness said.
The prime minister said it was not his administration that “create bad roads in Jamaica”, noting that “we have had bad roads for the last 40 or more years”.
“This administration will never say that poor workmanship, poor material and poor design is not a cause of some of the bad road conditions that we have. That is indisputable,” he added.
Arguing that roads built decades ago were not maintained, Holness posed a question to protestors: “Everyone that is protesting about roadways, why was this not done? It was not done because you did not elect governments that could create the proper economic management of the resources of the country to give the budget to support routine and consistent maintenance of the road.”
He said the country was now suffering from “aged infrastructure”, as the roads had not been maintained over decades.
Opposition Spokesman on Transport and Works, Mikael Phillips, accused the prime minister of attempting to hold “others responsible for the failures of his administration”.
Responding to the statement by Holness, the opposition spokesman said, despite questions to the prime minister about the drainage plan for the country since 2019, nothing has been done to suggest it was ready for implementation.
“Yes, the infrastructure has been deteriorating for a while, but ‘yes’, it is a fact that his administration has not done enough to maintain the infrastructure as we have it,” he said.
Phillips noted that while it has been announced that work on the SPARK programme would begin next month, the country is yet to be informed who has been awarded the contract to carry out the first phase of the programme.