Just when we thought Garfield Higgins, the removed principal of Tarrant High, had forsaken the lure of political misinformation, he has sadly returned to his accustomed pastime. For certain, he has enjoined Housing Agency of Jamaica Chairman Norman Brown and Information Minister Robert Morgan in a vulgar plot to distract the populace from their cascading atrocities regarding land and housing.

Not surprisingly, they have once more sought to cover their misdeeds with sensational but misleading commentary about Operation PRIDE, the impactual land reform programme which ended nearly two decades ago. This time, however, their sins are so blatant and the demand for facts so intense, that Higgins’s surreptitious enterprise will be fully exposed.

The Plot

The depth of the anomalies reveals the plot. We begin at the National Housing Trust’s (NHT) fault-riddled Ruthven Road apartments and its $35-million unit price — way beyond its core contributor population. Then there is the obscene $30-million price tag for the Beverly Hills lots, beyond the reach of public servants and private professionals. So unlike the the People’s National Party (PNP) who empowered their colleagues at the adjoining Long Mountain Country Club with unit prices of $4 million and $7 million. Again, the lack of transparency that attended the allocation process should be investigated.

Further, the announced policy to transfer the NHT’s mortgage portfolio to commercial banks in breach of the solemn worker governed precepts incorporated in its formation. This too must be hidden from the public. But the people’s indignation with the Government’s callous eviction of farmers at Bernard Lodge, followed by their inhumane bulldozing exercise at Clifton, led to the unholy plot to discredit PRIDE.

Having never confronted or regularised any of the 400 informal settlements islandwide or learnt from Operation PRIDE who successfully did, Prime Minister Holness, without proper due diligence, research or social engineering, embarrassed himself with a cynical, inhumane assault at Clifton, later repeated at Lluidas Vale.

Caught in a web of conspiracy by his own design, when it was revealed that the gang-related land sales he sensationally announced, was in fact perpetrated by a school principal well known to him from his constituency, the resultant political damage had to be covered up. The fallout, exacerbated by the continuing instances of corruption, such as the $12-million Negril sign and JC Hutchinson’s unending nepotism, Garfield Higgins and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) team sought a diversion, and eureka! Operation PRIDE.

Then came the unleashing of the plot, starting with an uninformed, unworthy diatribe by Juliet Holness, alleging unsupported claims and in the main disrespecting PNP supporters with the assertion that they are to be found on disaster-prone, squalor-infested lands. That was followed by Morgan’s particularly nasty threat, to have the police investigate unfounded allegations. The diversion exercise reached its zenith with the misleading offering in last Sunday’s Observer, by the would-be, self-acclaimed deputy scholar, Garfield Higgins. If in the past, Higgins and his fellow conspirators were emboldened by an unresponsive People’s National Party (PNP) to his PRIDE transgressions, it will not be so hereafter, at least not by the former PRIDE team.

Unravelling the Plot

This time his treacherous claims will have to surmount overwhelming facts and the unchallengeable findings of the late Ken Rattray, KC, a jurist of legendary integrity and acknowledged competence.

Summarily, Higgins’s claim of “PRIDE shame” is simply a regurgitation of Seaga’s deceptive, oft repeated, propagandist, political refrain, based on a nonsensical “projected $5.5-billion cost overrun on 10 PRIDE projects”. Seagas’s classification was not only a technical impossibility but was also taken from a fraudulent independent consultants document, discredited by the Angus Commission on whose findings he totally relied.

Higgins, the JLP activist who was similarly deceptive in criticising Peter Phillips’s patriotic tour de force as finance minister, has continued to mislead by purposely omitting to reveal that the commission found the said consultant’s document to be “sensational, baseless and unhelpful to its work”.

Even more critical, his total reliance on the findings of the commission is fatally undermined by the searing indictment of Ken Rattray, OJ, our former solicitor general, who exhibited unimpeachable due diligence in all his negotiations on behalf of a grateful nation. After detailed examination of the documentation and the commission’s final report, he scathingly charged the commission for:

* “Failing to carry out a rigorous and in-depth examination of the facts, including documents, before arriving at conclusions”.

* “Basing it’s conclusions on assertions which amounted to hearsay”.

Beyond Rattray’s unassailable summary, Higgins’s unholy labour is further undermined by the following:

(1) There were only 72 approved PRIDE projects including 35 ‘greenfield sites’ specially earmarked and developed for public sector and tourism workers. The ‘100 unfinished PRIDE sites’ alleged, is therefore known only to the claimant.

(2) PRIDE was an incrementally developed shelter programme. It spoke to sweat equity and self help with marginal government infrastructure expenditure to be costed and recouped by self employed and PAYE NHT mortgages. Any other allegations to the contrary does not fall in the PRIDE ambit. In addition, the land tax revenue from the formalisation of 58,000 beneficiaries, has by now far surpassed the amount the former government injected for infrastructure and environmental demands.

(3) The PRIDE team consisted of 15 members, none of whom were cited in the Angus Commission’s findings.

(4) At the conclusion of its work in 2005-6, PRIDE was successful in delivering 58,000 solutions, while $7.2 billion was expended against $2.8 billion collected from beneficiaries prior to the completion of mortgage payouts. The JLP Administration of 2007-11 must give a full account of any expenditure thereafter.

(5) There has never been a single claim of political favouritism or impropriety in the sale of any lot under PRIDE. It should be recalled that the listings of allottees were scored and publicised by the partnering public sector representatives, a seminal act of transparency that should be emulated by the JLP. Higgins and Morgan should advise the nation whether the non sale of one of the 58,000 lots could be possible in the current corrupt environment authored by their Government.

(6) Instead of seeking to discredit the programme, Higgins and his co conspirators should ponder at PRIDE’s purposefulness in lifting an entire cohort of the police high command, including three commissioners of police, into a deserved middle-class future at the Pines of Karachi and Wellington Heights.

We are also certain that their JLP colleagues, Marlene Malahoo Forte, the first chairman of the Pines of Karachi Provident Society, and retired Senior Superintendent of Police Newton Amos, the first chairman of the National Ratification Committee comprised of public sector representatives partnering PRIDE, will provide positive testimonials on the socio economic positives of the programme.

(7) Higgins and his fellow plotters should also be inspired by the land fortified economic empowerment of our 1998 Reggae Boyz, who took us to the World Cup and some of our brilliant athletes of yesteryear, but for PRIDE might have remained largely unrewarded and forgotten.

Finally, PJ Patterson’s monumental achievements are to be found in not only saving the Negril tourism product with the development of 3,000 lots at the environmentally destructive Whitehall informal settlement but also moving the vulnerable working class into a higher, more stable economic class within a generation at Clover, Fisher Rodd, Melrose, Mount Edgecombe, Belle Aire, the Pines of Karachi, Long Mountain and 66 other sites.

It is therefore certain that Patterson and the PNP will in time receive the commendation of unvarnished history, in the absence of political bias or political plots.

Paul Buchanan is former national coordinator of the Operation PRIDE programme, He also represented the People’s National Party as Member of Parliament for St Andrew West Rural from 2011 to 2016.