Dear Editor,

The People’s National Party (PNP) released its manifesto days ago promising the world without knowing where the money will be coming from to fund them. Why am I not surprised? By a quick check, to finance their current set of promises it would take just under $400 billion. And they have more to come.

In the manifesto, one of the things being promised is the building of 130,000 houses over five years. For some context, this is the same set of people who couldn’t build 10,000 houses over the entire time in Government. If the PNP couldn’t build 10,000 then, how are they ever going to build 130,000 in five years?

But what really blows up the charade is that the chairman of the PNP’s Manifesto Committee, Damion Crawford, in a tweet connected to this promise mentioned Operation PRIDE. Immediately, the cat was out of the bag. The PNP is trying to do an Operation PRIDE 2.0. Operation PRIDE 1.0 cost the Jamaican taxpayers billions of dollars and the vast majority of the houses were never built. The auditor general’s report of April 10, 1997 revealed the widespread inefficiency, corruption, and mismanagement that characterised the project.

It turned out, too, that contracts were awarded without compliance with standard procedures, and that there was no proper documentation of agreements for services to be provided by individuals and contractors; payments were made for work done without the work being certified; huge sums were paid in excess of the contracted amount; and there were wide disparities in the rates paid for site clearance where the work was done in the same kind of circumstances. Several instances were noted in which the payments for work done far exceeded the value of the agreements seen. However, no new or amended agreements were presented. It was revealed that the total amount seen on agreements totalled $10,182,167.68, but $26,946,274.77 had been paid to contractors. In the case of the work at Luana, the total contractors’ claims up to the time of the audit amounted to $55,609,603. In one instance $40.5 million was paid for jobs originally costed at a price of $1.1 million. That’s what the PNP wants to bring back to terrorise the finances of this country and run up the national debt to unsustainable levels and line their supporters pockets as happened before.

And if that were not enough, consider this sobering fact: The National Housing Development Corporation, under the PNP, wrote off $2 billion in losses for the Operation PRIDE housing development. Some 87 counts of fraud are before the courts for the matter.

We cannot, under any circumstances, allow this to happen again.

Another part of the PNP plan is basically to allow the National Housing Trust (NHT) and others to build houses at a cost, then have people live in them and pay rent for a while and then buy them, or something to that effect. We have seen some of this before. I will bet my last dollar that what will happen is that the real people who need the houses will not get them. The majority of the houses will go to PNP operatives, who will rent the houses for awhile then capture them. The NHT will lose billions. The PNP will have a new set of garrisons populated by a younger cohort of voters. These housing developments will turn into modern-day garrisons to serve one purpose — the winning of future elections.

The PNP knows the tide is changing against them. More young people are viewing the Jamaica Labour Party as the party of the future. So they are going back to the old playbook. This, once again, shows the PNP is incapable of leading this country forward.

Fabian Lewis

tyronelewis272@gmail.com