Dear Editor,

According the general secretary and the chairman of the ruling Jamaica Labour Party, this year’s party conference was to be one of celebration for the nearly two years in office. Well, I would say to them and the general leadership of the party that this conference should have been one of reflection, rather than celebration.

For too often we get carried away in the false hope of celebration when the truth and reality is camouflaged by catchy punch lines and the dancehall mentality of “forward” at these conferences, which is only a useless rhetoric that does not solve the problems at hand, and that’s what celebration does.

Watching and listening to the conference I saw where speaker after speaker fall to the dancehall mentality of punctuating their speeches with the catchy rhetoric — even our prime minister’s speech was punctuated with the inappropriate dancehall lyrics of “dutty niggah nuh like mi, and mi nuh like dem” much to the excitement of his partisan audience.

The only part of the prime minister’s speech which I will applaud is his call to the international community for support for the effects of climate change on the Caribbean community. The rest of the speech did not reflect on where we are as a nation, and how we got here.

The conference was held under the cloud of a frightened and shivering nation about the out of control crime wave, a public sector workforce whose rumblings about wage talks is of such seismic proportion that the very economic activity of the country may be at risk. Yes, 60,000 jobs have been added to the workforce since last year, but poverty and unemployment remains comparatively high when compared to all of our trading partners. Our dollar has been revalued, but the fundamentals of the economy do not support the movements of the dollar and confirm the claim by some economists that it is being artificially manipulated and will hurt the economy in the medium and long term.The fickle and unpredictable weather since this year has damaged and destroyed our infrastructural network and will therefore put added strain on our fiscal budget. I was hoping that the speeches at the conference would reflect on the aforementioned.

Seeing that Holness can be described as a millennial prime minister, I would have thought that this conference would be new and different and set the tone for how political conferences should be held, which is one that calls for partnership of all Jamaica and the Diaspora. It should be a platform for sharing policies and initiatives for the coming year, and one in which the Government is brutally frank with the Jamaican people on the many challenges facing the country. If conferences are held this way it would be more powerful than a broadcast to the nation of a statement in Parliament.

In my opinion, Holness has dropped the catch, but the game is still on, and I hope that he and other political leaders do not drop such easy catches again. Jamaica and the Diaspora are watching the game.

Fernandez Smith

Former JLP councillor

fgeesmith@yahoo.com