KINGSTON, Jamaica— Opposition Senator, Janice Allen, has used her second contribution to the State of the Nation Debate to paint a picture of the type of Jamaica she envisions for her countrymen.

For Allen, such a Jamaica is one where: “there are no wrong addresses and where there is no longer an automatic suspicion that an interaction between the citizens and police ends in a ‘he said, she said’ debacle'”.

Allen, the Opposition spokesperson on tourism, was speaking during the 2021/22 State of the Nation Debate in the Senate on Friday.

She also envisions a Jamaica where entrenched gender based violence is a memory and not a crisis and a state where the “instinctive protest for justice does not become reprisals and road blocks”.

Allen also yearns for a state where there are more weddings, graduations and birthday celebrations than funeral processions — especially when the cause of death is poverty and the reality that poverty spawns:

poor health care, poor education, poor emotional and mental health, poor decision making and, woefully wrong choices. 

Noting that in 2022 Jamaica will mark 60 years as an independent nation, Allen asked “What initiatives can we take now that will ensure that in addition to political independence there is nationhood, a feeling of welcome and belonging by Jamaicans in Jamaica that indeed their Jamaica can become their place of choice to live, work and raise families?”

Allen told her fellow senators that she would personally “commit to work diligently and creatively so that Jamaica, may, under God, increase in beauty and in fellowship,” in a direct quote from the National Anthem.

“Because you see Mr President it is the unfairness and imbalance in the society that has caused the nationhood and fellowship to elude us and for lasting prosperity to have evaded too many of our families for far too long,” she added.

“That is the current state of the nation,” she declared.