Dear Editor,

History will not be kind to the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) for the way the they have let down the Jamaican people. Here we have a country in crisis, poor governance, social and political misdemeanours, and all the leadership of the party is doing is to constantly fight each other.

What is wrong with these men and women? Is it that they are more interested in leadership at the party level,and to profile as Opposition leader and shadow spokespersons, rather than being a viable alternative to a weak and inept regime?

In all my political life, and following political regimes all over the democratic world, I have never heard or seen a party leader or Opposition leader being thrown under the bus so close to an election. The converse is also true, in that for an Opposition leader, he must exude confidence in his troops that there is a possibility for a victory. Where must the people turn for leadership? No wonder the majority of our youth would immediately give up their citizenship for that of a foreign country. Foreign countries have been capturing our best academic and professional brains, now they are digging into our sporting and cultural talent.

Who is going to halt this malaise and this great brain drain? Certainly not the JLP, which has now become the ‘humpty dumpty’ of modern Jamaican politics, neither will the PNP, for they so love the poor that they gave their only begotten nation to the International Monetary Fund and the Chinese.

But, like the character “Old Major” in George Orwell’s classic Animal Farm, I have a dream that, come the morning after the general election, birth will be given to a political party that will hold the Government accountable to the people and to its actions. Like a phoenix, it shall rise from the ashes of selfishness, arrogance, vision-lessness, and bring back sanity to political representation.

Fernandez Smith

fgeorgesmith@yahoo.com