MEMBERS of Jamaica’s business sector have called on political party leaders and representatives to control their supporters in order to ensure peaceful elections tomorrow.

“I think both leaders (the People’s National Party’s (PNP’s) Portia Simpson Miller and the Jamaica Labour Party’s (JLP’s) Bruce Golding have been saying the right things, however, they have to find a way to control their supporters and persons who are exuberant and probably overzealous because violence does not pay for anybody,” said president of the Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association (JHTA), Wayne Cummings.

Mark Kerr-Jarrett, managing director of Barnett Estates Limited in St James and past president of the Montego Bay Chamber of Commerce and Industry, also urged the prime minister and Opposition leader to encourage their supporters to behave themselves on election day.

“The international media are watching us, and so I think it is contingent on both party leaders and every candidate to keep their supporters in control. At no time does violence do anybody good, whether it is elections or otherwise,” Kerr-Jarrett told the Sunday Observer.

“We need to mature beyond this as a nation and go about the nation’s business in a civilised and peaceful fashion. It is, therefore, incumbent on the leadership of the parties and every candidate to ensure that their supporters behave peacefully and civilised.”

Cummings, too, noted the importance of having peaceful elections in the best interest of the island and its future development.

“At the end of the day, one party or the other will be in the government and life will go on. At the end of the day, family and people are more important than the political process. We urge both parties and their supporters to remember that it is Jamaica first,” the JHTA boss said.

He added that he was now only too happy the elections were at hand.

“The issues of crime and the publicity it brings is something that makes our business (tourism) a difficult one to market, and it has already been expressed in the international media, one, that we are having elections and, two, that it is becoming heated,” he said. “I am just happy that at this point it is going to be over soon, and we can get back to the business of living together and growing our country together.”

Their call comes in the wake of reports of political violence, which has left supporters from either side of the political divide either injured or dead.

One of the latest incidents, which saw JLP supporters coming under gunfire in the Eastern St Andrew constituency, forced a ban on campaigning in the Corporate Area and St Catherine.

But at least one political analyst, Shalmon Scott has predicted that there will be little, if any, violence. Neither the PNP nor the JLP, he said, could afford it.

“The political candidates are going to be ensuring that – to the extent that they can exercise that control – none of the kind of unsavoury incidents of violence takes place with the possibility of them having to go and rerun an election, which will involve two factors,” he told the Sunday Observer yesterday.

Those two factors, Scott said, are:

. the additional expenditure of money, which may prove difficult to raise after tomorrow; and

. the emotional and physical strain of campaigning.

“Many of them have been financially exhausted, and physically and mentally exhausted. So it is not only out of fear of the constitutional authority voiding the election, but it is also the fact that the candidates have been seriously challenged – financially, emotionally (on the campaign trail),” Scott said.