MANDEVILLE, Manchester — Opposition Senator Peter Bunting has criticised Prime Minister Andrew Holness for his recent comments in which he claimed that Jamaica would have ‘certainly collapsed’ if it had been governed by the People’s National Party (PNP) during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Holness on Wednesday praised the stewardship of his Administration, which he said has been pushing the country to recover to pre-pandemic levels.

“If this pandemic had hit any other government, the prospect of collapse of the government would be real. If this pandemic had hit a PNP government, the country would have certainly collapsed and I want them to come out and contradict it,” he said at a handing-over ceremony.

However, Bunting in hitting back at the Prime Minister said the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP)-led Government has failed to control crime.

“… Let me just remind you, you were the one who said people could sleep with their windows and door open if they had elected you, and you have failed miserably on that. So why you believe the PNP wouldn’t have done much better than you at dealing with COVID just like how we dealt with crime much better than you,” Bunting said while addressing a PNP town hall meeting at the Manchester High School in Mandeville on Thursday night.

Bunting, a former Minister of National Security, said Holness should stop blaming the PNP for the Government’s failures.

“He (Holness) keeps telling this story that in 2010 we prevented them from extending the State of Emergency (SOE). What’s the truth; in 2010 there was no Charter of Rights in our Constitution. In 2010, you only needed a simple majority of the House to extend (an SOE)… The JLP had a majority in 2010, so [if] you form a Government you could declare a State of Emergency and you could extend it as you like, you didn’t need any support from even one Opposition member,” said Bunting.

“Andrew Holness as Leader of Government business then in 2010 had the responsibility to ensure that for an important vote, all the JLP MPs were there to support their Government. He failed in that responsibility and so they did not have the votes to extend the State of Emergency. Take responsibility for your own failure and stop looking to blame PNP for the failures of this Government,” added Bunting.

Opposition Members of Parliament (PNP) and senators voted against the extension of the most recently declared SOEs in the Upper and Lower Houses of the Jamaican Parliament.

Bunting said that the 2022 FIFA World Cup is a contributing factor for the recent decrease in crime, as he criticised the Government’s position that the reduction was as a result of the States of Emergency.

“Is it about trying to use the distraction that everybody has with World Cup to try and take credit now to say well it is State of Emergency, when the Observer, not the PNP, the Observer gave notice, did a front page article saying how every time we have World Cup and indeed any of these big events the murder rate always goes down significantly,” he said in reference to the November 20 Sunday Observer article headlined “World Cup Crime Relief.”