Naked Truth needs no shift.

— William Penn

Last week during an unprecedented full day of interviews with the media, Prime Minister Andrew Holness made several lucid observations, that in all likelihood would have been lost on those who prefer to keep their heads buried in political quicksand. One in particular would have annoyed some folks.

“Let’s be clear, he is not new, not new. He is part of the old guard. He is not new,” said Holness in response to a question from ace newsman Cliff Hughes.

The prime minister is indeed right, there is nothing politically ‘new,’ about Dr Peter Phillips.

In a few weeks, 68-year-old Peter Phillips will ascend to the throne of Norman Manley’s 79-year-old People’s National Party (PNP). On April 2, the portly Phillips will become the leader of her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.

The birds, those politically ubiquitous John Chewits, Bananaquits and Black-bellied Plovers, tweet that Phillips’ ‘new’ but yet unofficial public relations team, are planning to sell him as ‘new, experienced and visionary’. Maybe they saw John Travolta and Nicolas Cage’s 1997 hit movie Face Off too many times, but did not really understand its thesis.

The many faces of Peter Phillips are not foreign to me and those who keep a close watch on the characteristic three-card brand of politics that has taken over the PNP since Norman Manley’s transition.

Some who have political cataract in both eyes seem not to remember that Phillips became a member of parliament in 1994.

Like his soon to be predecessor Portia Simpson Miller, who is to be exiled on a kind of political Elba, Phillips is the member of parliament for one of the worst constituencies in the country. With the exception of five years in total between 1994 and 2017 when the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) formed the Administration, Phillips’ party was in Government.

I visited the lion’s share of Phillips’ constituency last week. The roads, for the most part, are in a dire state. There is a general doldrums-like reality in many of the small avenues and drives. They seem to be in hiding from the minor thoroughfares that snake through sections of St Andrew East Central.

Then there is ‘Frog City’. Social and physical infrastructure are scarcely better, today compared to 23 years ago when Arthur Jones retired because of ill-health and Phillips replaced him after a by-election.

There have been several articles in this newspaper and by the old lady on North Street on the ‘dungle heap-like’ conditions in which residents of ‘Frog City’ have been forced to live.

Here is a snippet of the squalid conditions.

Headline: ‘Filthy Frog City — Small Community Off Maxfield Avenue Faces Acute Health Risk.’

Gleaner, April 22, 2012.

“The offensive smell of faeces hung like a thick dark cloud over the Corporate Area community residents call ‘Frog City’, but which could easily be called ‘Filth City’. The community, located off Maxfield and Chisholm avenues, is correctly known as Ricketts Crescent but for anyone familiar with the area, it is ‘Frog City’.

“When our news team visited the area recently, the offensive smell was everywhere, and so were the black scandal bags in which full or half loads of faeces had been tossed close to the playing field of the Norman Manley High School and into makeshift garbage pits; garbage heaps, or the open areas in sections of the community.”

“Running water is scarce and sometimes non-existent in the inner-city community.

“Public toilet and bathroom facilities constructed about a decade ago to offer some dignity to the men, women and children are no longer usable after they were vandalised.

“Flies, people and animals commingle in a maze of nastiness. When the wind blows, the residue of filth is felt all over your body, including in your mouth.

“Flies quickly move from the mounds of filth to the mouths of adults and young babies.

“Last Thursday, the Kingston and St Andrew Health Department disclosed that communities in the Hagley Park and Waltham Park areas were heavily infested with deadly disease-carrying rats.”

Well, you might say, surely Dr Phillips has eased the burdens of his constituents by now. You are wrong. This was a banner headline in the recently married old lady on North Street six weeks ago: ‘Frog City fed up!’ — Residents losing hope following 14-year wait,’ Gleaner, January 15, 2017.

Why has ‘Mr Fix-it’ not treated the people of Fog City better? During Phillips’ first competitive bid for the presidency of the PNP in 2005 he was ironically marketed as a man who wanted a return to family values and community spirit.

Like Oliver Twist in the Charles Dickens classic of the same name, St Andrew East Central is pleading, “Please sir, I want some more.”

Phillips does not have a string of political success, but ironically this is a premium recommendation for the top job in the PNP, which suffers from an acute Methuselah complex.

Dr Phillips formally joined the PNP in 1989. I say formally because Phillips said this in an article in the Gleaner of December 18, 2016: “I have worked all my adult life in the PNP. I have PNP antecedents as my grandfather was a councillor in the Bellefield Division in Manchester, and my father was influenced by his father as well. I have served in four ministries in Jamaica, and I have done well, albeit not without some problems.”

Since 1989 he has held a series of high-level posts in the party and under ex-prime ministers PJ Patterson and Portia Simpson Miller.

Between 1995 and 1997, Phillips was the minister of health. Under his leadership the hospital services floundered. We are still reaping some of the negative consequences.

Phillips was transport and works minister from 1998 to October 2001. To his eternal credit he ushered in a decent transportation system in the Kingston Metropolitan Transport Region (KMTR) in 1998.

The groundwork for what is today the Jamaica Urban Transit Company (JUTC) Limited was started in 1995 when the then Government decided that the time had come to restructure the public transport sector and invest in infrastructure to bring order to public transportation in the KMTR.

Before the advent of the JUTC what existed in the KMTR for public transportation was a disaster.

In November 2001, Phillips was appointed minister of national security. He was an abysmal failure: “In 2002, the murder rate moved to 40 per 100,000 and by 2005 it had risen to 64 per 100,000 population, placing Jamaica among nations with the highest murder rates in the world.” [Jamaica Constabulary Force: Police Crime Statistics]. On Phillips’ watch murders peaked at 1,674 in 2005. [JCF statistics]

An article in this newspaper on August 28, 2005 noted the following comparisons between Phillips and KD Knight who also served as security minister: “KD Knight can boast 40 or more pieces of legislation to strengthen crime policy, new and better vehicles for the police force, new policy direction for the police and a revitalised victim support programme, among other performance indicators. Phillips can make no such claim.”

From 2011 to February 25, 2016, Phillips served as minister of finance. He continued and augmented the economic reforms that were started by the Bruce Golding Administration. He did a good job of setting the macro-economic ducks in line under the watchful eye of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Peter Espeut, sociologist and development scientist, painted a brilliant picture of Phillips’ time at finance when he wrote these among other comments in the Gleaner of December 16, 2016: “What he has is the clinical approach of the academic, which served him well as the architect and implementer of the harsh IMF economic reforms. But he lacked the social empathy which would have connected with the suffering masses who needed to see a human face in the midst of the IMF austerity. He could balance the books, but did not convince people that he could “balance their lives”.

The growth figures for 2011 to 2015 tell the woeful tale of how Phillips choked the economy almost to death: 2012, -0.5 per cent; 2013, 0.2 per cent; 2014, 1.1 per cent; and 2015, 1.4 per cent — are mirrors of PNP misgovernment. The JLP left the economy growing at 1.6 in 2011. [STATIN]

Phillips, I believe, never truly accepted Portia Simpson Miller as his prime minister, notwithstanding public utterances of undiluted loyalty.

Phillips did, however, warn us about the pain that a Portia Simpson Miller-led Administration would mean for Jamaicans.

“Just under a year after the People’s National Party (PNP) lost power to the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), Dr Peter Phillips agreed with a United States official that Jamaica risked becoming like Haiti if the Government failed in its reform efforts and if Portia Simpson Miller, whom he called a ‘disaster’ for the country, was returned to power,” according to a US diplomatic cable made public by

WikiLeaks.”

“The US cable said that Phillips continued to ‘mull over whether to challenge Simpson Miller for control of the PNP during its party congress in September’, even as he acknowledged a recent poll showing her as more popular than Prime Minister Bruce Golding hampered his (Phillips’s) ability to challenge her for the leadership.

“Phillips stated that it was an astonishing possibility that the PNP, after ‘running the country into the ground for the last 18 years’, could possibly come back to power,” the cable said.

“The cable, dated July 8, 2008, also said that when the US officer asked Phillips if he would ever serve in another Simpson Miller-led Government, the former national security minister stated that he never says never, but his answer is ‘no; it would simply be too distasteful’. Efforts to reach Phillips last night for a comment on the matter were unsuccessful.” (Jamaica Observer, July 7, 2011)

Dr Peter Phillips, contrary to what some would have us believe, is no political virgin.

The Portia Simpson Miller-led Administration did cost the country dearly. The unabated actions of Phillip Paulwell, the disrespect of our women by septuagenarian AJ Nicholson, misstep after misstep by Anthony Hylton, Dr Fenton Ferguson, and others in the Simpson Miller Cabinet have damaged Jamaica’s credibility abroad.

Phillips was right about Portia. But he was right about little else.

On Sunday, July 19, 2015 Phillips spoke at a political rally in York Town, Clarendon. Dr Phillips and a delegation had just returned from a political junket to Ethiopia. At York Town, Phillips placed the country on election alert. Putting the Comrades in the ‘stand behind your blocks’ mode was a ‘safeguard,’ used to marshal the political soldiers. Party discipline had by then become elusive.

The PNP campaigned for six months. It did not succeed in putting Humpty Dumpty together.

The party had not learned from former prime minister Michael Manley, who had announced the general election held on October 30, 1980 in February of that year.

On December 13, 2015, I wrote among other things in this newspaper: “True to form, the PNP has built a campaign on political scaffolding constructed with rotten scrap metals taken from someone’s abandoned garage. A construction outfit that cuts corners and delivers sixes for nines is not only untrustworthy, but is equally as dangerous as the eight out of every 10 block makers that the Jamaica Bureau of Standards says have sent inferior products to the market.” Sunday Observer, December 13, 2015.

Peter Phillips was the PNP’s campaign manager for the last general election. His obsession with the half-finished house of Andrew Holness was the epitome of bad mind. ‘Bad mind’ is not a sensible political strategy in Jamaica. Simpson Miller said she did not take the decision not to debate. Who did?

Except for Peter Espeut, lawyer and political commentator Dr Paul Ashley, I believe, has given the best explanation as to what qualifies Peter Phillips for the presidency of the PNP. “Phillips is a good Comrade who has paid his dues. He has also held more offices within the party and served on more party committees than most, if not all, members of Parliament combined. And he is well known among the delegates.” Jamaica Observer, August 28, 2015.

I wrote in this space some weeks ago that Phillips will not enter Jamaica House as prime minister. I stand by that political forecast.

Quality is not an act, it is a habit. — Aristotle

Garfield Higgins is an educator, journalis, and advisor to the minister of education, youth and information. Send comments to the Observer orhiggins160@yahoo.com.

Garfield Higgins is an educator, journalis, and advisor to the minister of education, youth and information. Send comments to the Observer or

higgins160@yahoo.com.