OPPOSITION leader Bruce Golding yesterday said the ruling People’s National Party (PNP) needed to “tek weh” itself from Jamaica House, after close to two decades of failing to provide Jamaicans with a good quality of life.

No one needs to look beyond the condition of markets across the island, including the one at Linstead with its deplorable bathroom facilities and leaking roof to see the truth of this, Golding said.

“If after 18 years you can’t do something about the markets of the country, then it means that you can’t do it again. Not even 50 years yuh caan do it. It’s time yuh ‘tek weh yuhself’,” said the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) president, borrowing a line from a popular dancehall hit.

He was speaking after a tour of the Linstead market in St Catherine.

His statement was greeted by loud cheers from his green-clad supporters who converged at Linstead Square in St Catherine to see him.

Golding added that people’s access to roads and potable water had faired no better than markets under the PNP administration.

“There are thousands of poor people, especially in the rural parts of Jamaica, who don’t know what it is like to have a pipe reach in their house. They wake up in the morning and have to go to some little stream somewhere, some little mudhole. When they go down there, they have to beg the cow and the goat pass because the whole a them a drink out a de same hole,” he said.

“And I say, you coulda tell mi you couldn’t do it in the first term. I woulda start question yuh if you couldn’t do it in the second term. But you get three term, yuh get four term and you cannot give the people of Jamaica a decent little water supply. If after 18 years you cannot give the people water, it means you coulda get another 150 years and they would be still out of water. It is time to ‘tek weh yuhself’,” he reiterated.

He also rubbished Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller’s past assertions concerning her love of poor people. According to the Opposition leader, if the prime minister truly loved the poor she would do more for them. One way in which this could have been demonstrated, Golding said, is through allowing wider access to free health care at public hospitals.

“When you seh yuh not charging the young people them, is fool yuh fooling up people. The people them weh need the help is the old lady, the old man because when yuh reach a certain age yuh know seh certain things going gwaan. Some sugar (diabetes) going gwaan. Some pressure (hypertension) going gwaan. Arthritis going gwaan, some heart worries going gwaan,” the Opposition leader said.

“Those are the people that need the help. But those are the ones (to which) the prime minister says, I love poor people but I don’t love them that much. So I am going to make sure you get the attention you need,” he added.

At the same time, he said that there was far more the government could do for education, not the least of which is granting free access to all public high schools.

“All I need to abolish what is left of tuition fees in government high schools (is) less than a billion dollars. The prime minister seh no, she can’t find that. She don’t love poor people that much,” he said, pointing out that it was the same government that had spent $9 billion on Cricket World Cup 2007.

But if elections are called early enough, Golding said he would see to it that at the start of the new 2007/2008 school year, children enjoy tuition-free access to government high schools.

“If I am in Jamaica House before school opens in September, I give you this assurance – yuh going still have to find little money fi the bus fare; yuh going still have to find the little money fi the lunch money but not one of you will have to pay any tuition fee,” he said.

It is a promise that Golding has been making on the campaign trail in the run up to general elections, which are constitutionally due by October this year.

Meanwhile, he suggested that he would not renege on his promise, noting that he had a vested interest in ensuring the education of the island’s children.

“I can’t build a prosperous country unless we have an educated workforce and therefore is not just you want your children to be educated, I need them to be educated as well,” he said.

He noted that the present government had for too long been allowed to fail the education system.

“I know many of you parents sacrifice to send (your children) to school.

After parents sacrifice, seven out of every 10 children who come out of high school don’t pass not even one subject – not even one,” Golding said. “And I say to the prime minister, the whole of the government, the whole of the PNP that if after 18 years you cannot fix the education system it means that that education system bigger than your head. ‘Tek weh yuhself’.”

He has, in the interim, urged his supporters to be patient, saying that general elections would soon be called.

“Be cool, be patient. The announcement will soon be made. As I go round the country, plenty people come and ask, ‘how long’. I seh, ‘not long’. They ask me, ‘how soon’, I seh ‘soon, soon’,” he said.