The Government’s Jamaica Emergency Employment Programme (JEEP) is a well intentioned poverty alleviation initiative, crash programme or not, which is desperately needed in an economy which has a high rate of unemployment such as ours.

Once again, a potentially useful programme has hit a rocky road, not on the basis of its potential for good, but because of the need for political point-scoring, a problem which has hampered the implementation of government policies since Independence. Let’s face it, the people who have not worked for years don’t care who started what.

This claim of paternity by the Opposition Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and the People’s National Party’s (PNP’s) claim of maternity both smack of the usual political tribalism that we are so desperate to put behind us, especially after 50 years of Independence.

In the same breath, we wish to condemn in the strongest possible way the call by Comrades to remove Labourites from jobs on the Fern Gully main road development project in St Ann. Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller should immediately make it known that that crab-in-a-barrel mentality will not be allowed to stand.

It is our view that a government programme does not belong to a political party but to the people of the country. All ideas are the evolution of a series of earlier contributing ideas and therefore ideas are the product of collective cerebral interaction. It is ironic, if not transparently dishonest, for the JLP to claim that the JEEP was a repackaging of their programmes when less than a month ago in the general election campaign they dismissed it as unworkable. It would be equally dishonest if the PNP did not acknowledge its antecedents.

This is not a zero-sum game and the benefits are much less if there is no equity in distribution and participation, in which the only criteria for selection must be that the person is Jamaican, willing and able.

JEEP, as conceived, if it remains on the straight and narrow in its design and implementation, can make an economic contribution to employment, infrastructure and the environment. The scale on which the programme is implemented will depend on the allocation within a budget in which half has to be used to pay debt and resources from external development institutions.

JEEP is compatible with the road improvement programme which the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) had already approved, and the funds are ready for disbursement. The pertinent information on the road improvement programme can be found on the IDB website.

We are pleased that a campaign promise is being fulfilled, given the failure of so many others, and Dr Peter Phillips, the finance minister, must be congratulated for moving quickly and decisively to harness the IDB funding, irrespective of who the negotiator was.

We’d hate to see a return to the days of the senseless name games which gave us things like the Jamaica Information Service (JIS), then the Agency for Public Information (API) then back to JIS; and the National Youth Service, then the Human Employment And Resource Training (HEART) Trust, among others.