DESPITE their fractious campaigning for the presidency of the People’s National Party (PNP), whomever of the four candidates wins, will need to draw on the platform of issues being pushed by their rivals, says Professor Brian Meeks.

At the same time, Sunday Observer checks with leading commentators from the private sector, academia and the environmental lobby found striking agreement on a number of priority issues that the new cabinet should consider – the economy, employment creation, education, the environment and governance.

“Depending on who wins, the winner will have to take under consideration each others’ programmes,” said Meeks, head of the Department of Government at the University of the West Indies (UWI).

Candidate Dr Omar Davies has placed critical emphasis on the issue of empowerment for people which has vast implications for addressing matters like education and access to financing for small business ventures, among others, the university professors says.

Phillips, for his part, has focused on creating employment at a time when issues such as zero deficits and balancing the budget are abroad, which implies shifting things towards micro issues and perhaps expanded expenditure to spur employment growth.

“At the same time, Simpson Miller, and Blythe, perhaps less so, because of the kind of below the radar campaign he has been running, have returned matters to grassroots issues, focusing on people and how the structural adjustments of the last 20 years has affected them,” says Meeks.

He noted that while there may be apparent contradictions in accommodating all the perspectives, “the PNP needs all four of them and a clear merging of the ideas.”

“It is not winner takes all, but the winner accommodating the losers,” argues Meeks.

He believes that a lot would turn on whether Phillips and Davies could work with Simpson Miller and Blythe or vice versa, after a bruising campaign, and appears to discount what real effect Patterson in his last days in office could do to unite the various camps and restore party unity after the campaign, as he has vowed to do.

“Once the power has shifted, there is little that anyone can do to influence events,” Meeks reasons.

But he suggests that for the sake of self-preservation, “if no other motive”, the party needs to coalesce quickly around a new leader, or risk early elections which he moots would favour the opposition Jamaica Labour Party (JLP).

The candidate who wins was less of interest than the issues they would push, according to the president of the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ) Beverly Lopez.

“We had already identified four areas – law and order, the economy, education and governance in its widest sense – and we had put these on the table for debate,” said Lopez.

Environmentalist Peter Espeut is pessimistic that whatever configuration emerges will not be any more favourable to the environment, noting that successive administrations have treated environmental matters with scant regard, or had been tagged onto ministries that in themselves presented obvious contradictions.

“It has been riddled with contradictions, it has been twinned with health, tourism, housing… The environment needs a ministry of its own and should incorporate under it those departments concerned with extracting resources, not bauxite mining, but rather things like fisheries and forestry,” said Espeut.