Despite new leadership, nothing has changed and it has been pretty much business as usual in Jamaica, said Opposition Leader Bruce Golding in his New Year message.

Golding said stagnation had characterised the daily lives of many Jamaicans “who wake up every morning with no job to go to, with bills they can’t pay, basic things they can’t buy and sick family members they can’t take care of, who cling desperately to hopes that are fading before their very eyes”.

But he described 2006 as an eventful year, thanking God for sparing the country any major natural disaster, although ending the year with an outbreak of malaria which “should not have been allowed to happen”.

Obviously referring to the emergence of Portia Simpson Miller as prime minister, Golding said 2006 witnessed a change in the leadership of the government with all its hopes and expectations.

He said people expected “a new kind of governance, a new relationship between the people and their government, a new covenant of trust, a new vision that all Jamaicans could share and a mobilisation of the national will and an engagement of the national spirit toward achieving common goals”.

“But nothing has really changed. It has been pretty much ‘business as usual’…I recently met a young man from a rural district in Clarendon. He is 26 years old, went to high school and came out with two CXC passes. He does not know what it is like to have a job. Yet, he used to have such high hopes for himself.

“He told me that as a child his ambition was to become an engineer but toward the end of his school years he concluded that that was not going to be possible. So, he decided to settle for being a mechanic. That, too, didn’t materialise so he decided he wanted to become a truck driver. That would at least enable him to earn a living.

“But despite getting his driver’s licence he has never been able to get a job. As he said to me, “Even a sideman work I woulda glad fi get it”. So this young man, excited about his own possibilities, starts out with the ambition to become an engineer but has had continuously to lower his own expectations to the point where he would be satisfied with any kind of work.”

The opposition leader said people were the nation’s greatest asset, “not the bauxite we mine or the beaches which lure so many tourist visitors”, because people had the potential to be productive, to create and do things to provide a better life for themselves, their families and the entire nation. “But it is an asset that is wasting away because we lack the means to develop that potential and to put that asset to work.”

Said Golding: “We can place Jamaica on the road to real development where every child can go to a good school and every adult to a decent job. We can transform Jamaica into a nation in which everyone might not be rich but no one has to be poor.

“That must be our challenge for 2007, a year in which the people will have the opportunity to choose and to decide. And we must all become involved… For Jamaica belongs to all of us and all of us must rise to the occasion to restore hope, to chart a new course, to build a better Jamaica to provide a better life. 2007 is the year of decision.”