A handful of turncoats will take centre stage today as almost 500 people are expected to be nominated to contest the 228 divisions in the February 26 local government elections.

The two major political parties — the People’s National Party (PNP) and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) — are expected to nominate candidates to contest all 228 divisions and the Portmore mayoral race, while the United Independents’ Congress (UIC) is expected to nominate a handful of candidates.

In addition, a number of independent candidates are expected to throw their hats in the ring, including businessman Howard Hamilton, who will be bidding to become the next mayor of the municipality of Portmore in St Catherine.

But most interest will surround candidates who will be nominated to contest divisions which they won previously on one party’s ticket and will now be contesting on the ticket of another party.

At the top of the list is firebrand politician Venesha Phillips, who resigned from the PNP following the election of Mark Golding as the party’s president and made the switch to the JLP last year.

Phillips won the Papine Division for the PNP in 2012 and 2016, and made an unsuccessful bid to become the Member of Parliament for the constituency, St Andrew Eastern, in 2020.

More spice was added to the Papine Division contest last Sunday when Golding, in introducing Darrington Ferguson as the PNP’s candidate for the Papine Division, declared that he was going to teach a lesson to Phillips whom he dubbed a “traitor”.

In subsequent media interviews Phillips rejected the traitor label and expressed confidence that she would move the seat, which she won by almost 300 votes in 2016, into the JLP’s win column.

There will be similar interest in the Mocho Division in Clarendon North Central, where Romaine Morris, who won on a JLP ticket in 2016, will be nominated on a PNP ticket this time around, having switched allegiance following a fallout with the Member of Parliament Robert Morgan.

Morris won the division by almost 400 votes in 2016 and the PNP leadership in Clarendon has expressed confidence that he will take the majority of those votes with him to win the seat for the party this time around.

But that has been scoffed at by the JLP which had indicated that Morris would not have been selected to contest the division even if he had stayed.

Other turncoats who will attempt to move voters with them include Kari Douglas in the Trafalgar Division in St Andrew South Eastern.

Having won the division by 85 votes in 2016, Douglas crossed the floor in 2020 and declared that, “My former political party has also for sometime not been a space where creative ideas, especially the thoughts of young people, are encouraged and treated seriously. I have decided that enough is enough.”

Douglas, the daughter of late PNP vice-president and Cabinet member Easton Douglas, was unsuccessful in her bid to become the Member of Parliament for the constituency in 2020, but showed enough to suggest that some of her former PNP supporters have switched with her.

In Westmoreland, former PNP councillors Ian Myles (Little London Division) and Garfield James (Sheffield Division) are expected to don green shirts today as they are nominated on JLP tickets.

The contest in Little London is poised to be most intriguing as Myles and his former campaign manager, Oliver Reid, are the two expected to be nominated today.

Nomination is slated to be conducted between 10:00 am and 2:00 pm today and on Wednesday, Director of Elections Glasspole Brown told the
Jamaica Observer that his office is all set to go.

“I am confident that our trained and experienced returning officers are prepared to efficiently execute nomination proceedings on Thursday. We hope that the day’s events will pave the way for a successful local government election,” said Brown.

He pointed out that the times for individuals to be nominated were being worked out at the local level with the returning officers coordinating the process.

In the meantime, deputy commissioner of police in charge of the strategic operations portfolio Clifford Blake told the
Observer that all is set for the nomination process.

“I can say with all confidence that we are prepared. All my commanders, we have met and they have indicated that they are ready. We have met with the director of elections and his team and we are all prepared to go,” said Blake, who refused to provide details of the security plans.

“I am not going to be very specific in terms of our deployment but just to assure the public that we will be covering all the nomination centres and I may just go further to say that we are far advanced with our security preparedness and our security plan for the local government election of February 26,” added Blake.