Santa Cruz, St Elizabeth – For Bruce Golding, the final stop on last Thursday’s tour of South East St Elizabeth was a little like coming home to family and friends.

The opposition leader had arrived in Queensberry, a quiet farming district in the lower reaches of the Santa Cruz Mountains, just west of Southfield, where his mother Enid Louise Bent-Golding was born.

And having walked and greeted the locals, several of them his cousins, Golding, flanked and introduced by Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) caretaker Frank Witter and party deputy leader Horace Chang, took up position on a shop piazza, under a tamarind tree and not surprisingly, delivered a message on rural development.

Claiming that the People’s National Party (PNP) government of the past 17 years had neglected rural folk while preoccupying itself with “big” projects such as highways and hotels, Golding told the folk of Queensberry that for he and his party, rural development must involve “three things all wrapped up in one”: education, increased agricultural production and meaningful political representation.

For the locals complaining bitterly about bad roads and the absence of running water, Golding touched a nerve and drew applause when he claimed that such was the PNP government’s neglect of the rural areas that it was “like Queensberry drop off the map”.

Insisting that an upgraded education system was vital if Jamaica was to lift itself out of underdevelopment and move forward, the JLP leader said he would not backtrack on his promise to remove from parents the cost of tuition fees at secondary school level, should he gain political power after the upcoming parliamentary elections.

“If you can’t guarantee that the children will have access at least to secondary education, then what you are doing is condemning them to darkness.,” he said. “I get angry when I hear people talking on radio as if this is some wild, reckless promise that the Labour Party is making.”

He argued that in Barbados, education has long been free up to university level, and another Caricom sister nation, Trinidad & Tobago, has provided free tuition to high school students and was now moving to provide the same benefits at university level.

Yet in Jamaica, “instead of trying to follow them, we are going backwards”, Golding said.

He rejected suggestions that the cost to the Jamaican economy would make such a move reckless at this time.

The sum that was needed annually to make tuition free to high school level was $500 million, Golding claimed. This, he argued, was less than the $575-million which Finance Minister Omar Davies had to find “every single day, including Saturday and Sunday”, to service the national debt.

Moving to his “second pillar” of rural development, that of increasing farm production in order to strengthen the economic base, Golding argued that the answer was technology. Already he said, a select few were reaping the benefits by using modern technology, including green houses, to increase production by up to “five times” what it was before.

The challenge was to empower the ordinary man to also access modern technology, so that his production levels will allow him to “make a good money” while keeping prices competitive with cheap imports.

A government led by him would be moving to reduce the cost of modern farm technology and to lend money to farmers to access that new technology as well as provide training. It was time, he argued, for farmers everywhere in Jamaica to move from the “donkey to the pick-up”.

Golding said his ‘third pillar’, effective political representation, would be bolstered by his plan for 2.5 per cent of the budget to be divided equally among all 60 political constituencies to address the areas of greatest need. In such a situation, he argued, communities such as Queensberry would be in a position to have their greatest needs – not least roads and running water – addressed.