OPPOSITION Leader, Bruce Golding, says that the current disunity within the ruling People’s National Party (PNP) is threatening the effective governance of the country.

Speaking Saturday night at a function at the Liguanea Club in New Kingston, to present Joan Gordon-Webley as the Jamaica Labour Party’s (JLP) candidate for South East St Andrew, Golding said that there was tension, insecurity, mistrust and open hostility even within the Cabinet.

“.The recent imbroglio over the handling of the cement crisis is just one case in point. A government cannot function effectively in that kind of environment,” the opposition leader said.

A Cabinet, said Golding, would face crises very often without any warning and there are challenges to the government.

But he said if when crises arise and challenges emerge, there must be problems for the ruling party and the country if some members of the administration try to secure a particular advantage, instead of the entire Cabinet pooling its resources and its intellectual capacity to address them in the interest of the country.

Golding said was, however, in sympathy with Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller because he had been through similar problems when he took over as leader of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) in 2005.

“I came under criticism because people felt I should be doing this and I should be doing that. But, I recognised that the first order of business was to unite the party. If you can’t unite the party, you can’t unite the country,” he said.

He admitted that there were challenges in trying to assure everyone in the JLP that he did not intend to “leave any labourite behind”.

“I had to reach out to people whom I had enough cause to be apprehensive about. But, I recognised that it was not about me. It was about the party. And it wasn’t even so much about the party, it was about the country,” said Golding.

He added: “Sure we have had dislocations. Sure we have had some separations and ,in a sense, some of that, perhaps, could not have been avoided. In a sense some of that, perhaps, was good and necessary for the party. But, I believe that I can say, and it is the first time I am saying publicly, that I am now satisfied that the JLP is today more united than it has been for the last 20 years,” he said.

Gordon-Webley, a former representative for the East Rural St Andrew, promised to work in the interest of both the wealthy and poverty-stricken communities in the diverse constituency which extends from the bottom of Mountain View Avenue to New Kingston, and also includes Swallowfield and Cross Roads.

She promised to make the young and the elderly priorities of her programmes which, she said, were already being put into practice by her constituency committee.

Five residents of the constituency – Ivan Moore, Pearl Bailey, Dora Huie, Miriam Jones and Cuthbert Pinto – were honoured for service to the party

since the 1950s.