PORT MARIA, St Mary – As the general election campaign climaxes to the seven-day pre-Independence rest period, beginning next Wednesday, the People’s National Party (PNP) is set to dispatch search teams across the island to ‘find’ the 25,000 housing units Opposition Leader Bruce Golding said his government built between 1981 and 1989.

In a swift response to the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) leader’s disclosure Saturday night at a mass meeting in Bog Walk, St Catherine that the JLP government built 25,000 houses, PNP President Portia Simpson Miller said the PNP has been trying to locate the houses built by the JLP.

Speaking at a mass meeting in front of several thousand PNP supporters in Port Maria on Tuesday night, the PNP president said when the houses are located she will address the matter.

“I have sent out to check the houses that yuh say yuh build. We trying to find them. And when we find the right amount, when we find what is recorded, that was built by you, I will address it.,” the PNP president said to loud applause from the large crowd.

Golding, the JLP minister of construction in the 1980s, has often been criticised for his government’s failure to live up to the housing explosion under the PNP government in the 1970s, which was spearheaded by the then housing minister, Anthony Spaulding.

The PNP has accused the JLP of building only 4,000 houses, while boasting that some 40,000 housing units were made available in various forms during the PNP term of the 1970s.

“The minister of housing now checking, and I am sending across Jamaica to identify what yuh said you have done.,” the PNP president said.

Praising the late PNP president, Michael Manley, for building ‘houses for poor people’ in Majesty Gardens (South West St Andrew) Simpson Miller said the programme was continued by Prime Minister P J Patterson in the inner-city housing programme.

“If you want to talk about housing in Jamaica, for poor people, for professionals, for middle income, starting from Norman Manley, you have to talk about the People’s National Party (PNP).,” she said.

Last Saturday, Golding, responding to PNP general secretary, Donald Buchanan, who spoke at a Morant Bay mass meeting the previous Wednesday night, said the JLP’s capability to deliver houses in the 1980s was stymied as a result of the poor state of the economy after the Manley government demitted office in 1980.

Buchanan claimed that Golding’s tenure as minister of construction was lousy.

Stung by the criticisms, Golding fired back at the Bog Walk rally and challenged the PNP president to tell what she knows about the “political cleansing” which took place during 1975-1976, which saw St Andrew South West transformed from a JLP to a PNP stronghold.