Agriculture Minister Roger Clarke yesterday urged Jamaicans who will benefit from new housing schemes to reward the ruling People’s National Party (PNP) with their votes and told the builders they needed to complete the development within the next three years.

“Remember, that it was through Minister Roger Clarke and the People’s National Party mi get it; mi a go reward them, yes, because one hand wash the other, and if I scratch your back, you scratch fi mi back too,” Clarke told his audience of mostly sugar workers.

He was speaking at the opening ceremony of a low-income housing solution model unit at Innswood in St Catherine.

A total of 1,000 units are to be built in the scheme, and under the programme being run by Sugar Company of Jamaica (SCJ) Holdings Ltd in partnership with North Star Development Ltd, another 11,000 housing units are to completed across the island in three years.

Clarke said that sugar workers will benefit from the schemes, and he urged the developers to move quickly to complete the housing solutions as the Government was almost two years into its five-year term.

“We gone two years almost now,” he said. “Three years’ time we have to go back, so whatever to happen, make it happen before the three years done, and that is a challenge.”

Added Clarke: “… We not going start and relax because time is not on our side.”

After the function, when the Jamaica Observer asked Clarke to clarify his comments, he said: “We not going to know who is from which party. What we do, if people benefit and they are happy with you they will come with you, some won’t.

“If I satisfied a Labourite, based on what we have done him going think more about whether he should support me or not, and if I don’t satisfy the PNP person the same thing will happen.

“There is no mark on anybody to show that this one is Labourite or PNP, but my intention is to do everything that I can do to make as many people satisfied as is humanly possible, and once I do that I will rest assured that if I look after them they will look after me.”