A group of adventurers, all professionals from Jamaica, North America and Europe set out on a three-week walk across Jamaica, from Morant Point in St Thomas to Negril, Westmoreland, in the month of February 2015. Impressed by their energy, strong sense of social consciousness and their love for Jamaica, I joined them for a few hours during their walk in St Thomas.

After the completion of their all-island walk, the lead organiser said the following: “Walking from St Thomas to St Andrew is a shocking indictment on development. As we crossed the line from one parish to another it was as if we walked through an invisible veil. On one side there were roads (St Andrew) and very few board houses, and on the other there were no roads and many board houses. I could visibly see the population’s frustration and I was sad to see this…”

Clearly stung by mounting criticisms of his performance as Member of Parliament for St Thomas Eastern, and a recent Jamaica Observer news article titled ‘JLP candidate says poverty ravaging St Thomas’ on Monday, March 2, in highlighting the frustration about the sordid state of affairs in the constituency, Dr Ferguson responded in the Sunday Observer of March 29, 2015 with over 2,200 words defending the indefensible.

Completely out of touch as he is, Dr Ferguson, who has already shown to all Jamaica his miserable failure as our health minister, sough to paint a pretty picture of his performance as MP. Let us not forget that the CHIKV spread with ferocity across his constituency and, despite early pleas from myself, Dr Ken Baugh, and other concerned parties, the MP and minister dismissed the in-your-face reality. Today, many people are still in pain and several, including young people, with apparently pre-existing medical issues, are dead. Beyond that, the Princess Margaret Hospital, the largest public health facility in the parish, is grossly short of medical personnel and has developed a bad reputation.

Notably also, Dr Ferguson completely ignored in his long missive the fact that the parish, under his watch, is now Jamaica’s poorest, with poverty having doubled from roughly 14 per cent in 2008 to 32.5 per cent or more today, according to the Jamaica Survey of Living Conditions. From my own analysis, and that of others, poverty is in excess of 50 per cent. The Social Development Commission, in its most recent parish profile, pointed to poverty rates of up to 70 per cent in several districts, and noted that approximately 50 per cent of the parish’s labour force is unemployed.

Ferguson completely ignored the fact that, despite bordering Jamaica ‘s capital city, the pit latrine is the most prevalent type of toilet facility used by households in St Thomas, accounting for 54.7 per cent of households. He completely ignored the fact that, under his leadership, the constituency is a literal case study of governmental negligence and how not to be a MP. The areas water and road infrastructure are an absolute mess, a major turn-off for any investor. Education and skill-training programmes are grossly inadequate, leaving a number of youth with little in education and/or skills certification. The towns, including Morant Bay, Bath, Port Morant, Duckenfield, are in an awful state, underlying the terrible lack of vision and zero pragmatic development initiatives over the years. So bad are the constituency’s state of affairs that I had to make an urgent call earlier this year for the telecommunications and media companies to improve service in the area as thousands of residents, with little in the way of TV, radio and cellular signals, were virtually cut off from the outside world in this the year of our Lord 2015.

Nonetheless, Dr Ferguson should not be blamed for all these failures, after all, despite a strong JLP history of leadership spanning 1944 to 1993, the party, largely because of instability over the years, allowed him to stay in office for over 20 years, much to the detriment of frustrated constituents.

Noting the terrible state of affairs, I decided to establish a development task force last year involving some of the parish’s most successful people, including two who now reside overseas. We are working on a pragmatic development plan that will very likely integrate highway development, agriculture, agro-processing, light manufacturing, port development, and tourism into a programme aimed at blasting the parish out of its long-running mode of underdevelopment and poverty. The first step is to build a “decent” highway for the parish.

If this country has any chance of real development, with genuine care for the less privileged and working towards addressing our basic issues, we must retire failing MPs like Dr Fenton Ferguson forthwith.

Delano Seiveright is JLP Caretaker, St Thomas Eastern.