Dear Editor,

Let me just ask a question because it seems like the people who run Jamaica do not have the necessary brain cells needed to figure things out.

I just saw on Audley Shaw’s Facebook page where he posted the letter from Bruce Golding in yesterday’s newspaper about the US$ charges per megabyte and gigabyte of data, in an attempt to justify Shaw’s phone bill.

Now, here we have a past prime minister saying he had a bad experience after attending a two-day conference in Beijing, after which his phone bill came to $360,000 when his normal bill was usually just over $5,000. When he queried the excessive charges he was told that they were attributed to data roaming charges billed at US$8 per megabyte and US$8,000 per gigabyte.

Now my question is this: While he was Prime Minister of Jamaica, was Mr Golding not interested in what poor people were paying as in roaming charges when it came to their phone bills?

Since this new JLP Administration took office, were companies like FLOW, Digicel and others not checked as to what they were charging poor people, or what these charges in megabytes, gigabytes and all other bytes were? How can you be finance minister for a country and not be aware of the cost of gigabytes and megabytes of data?

When Arnaldo Brown had a phone bill of $1 million and the Opposition JLP then called for an inquiry, why did it not occur to them then, that the data charges were responsible for Mr Brown’s then massive phone bill?

Each time these Labourites try to defend Mr Shaw’s gross dishonesty and total disregard for tax payers, they keep digging a hole for themselves.

What is evident by this fiasco is that the JLP does not care about poor people, because if they did they would have sought answers for these queries which poor people have been complaining about for how long now.

So, no, that excuse does not fly with me.

This JLP Govt is pathologically mendacious, hypocritical, and full of it, and the people supporting them are just as evil.

Michelle Bradshaw