DECLARING that “you can’t trust people who tell you that they want to do something and then they change their mind when the work gets hard”, Legal and Constitutional Affairs Minister Marlene Malahoo Forte stopped just short on Tuesday of accusing Opposition Leader Mark Golding of derailing the constitutional reform process.

Making her contribution to the 2025/26 Sectoral Debate in the House of Representatives, Malahoo Forte displayed Golding in his own words speaking in the Parliament, and separately at a press conference, where he appeared to voice support for constitutional reform on one occasion, while backing away on the other occasion.

During his speech in the House, Golding, who is the president of the People’s National Party (PNP), said: “The important process of repatriating our sovereignty, which began in 1962, has stalled and there is important unfinished business. The time has come for Jamaica to become a republic within the Commonwealth, with a Jamaican head of State, and for us to swear allegiance to the constitution and people of Jamaica.

“Let us proceed with the legal steps required to achieve this since there is consensus that this is where we need to go. We also believe strongly in the importance of providing access to the highest level of justice for the Jamaican people by moving from her Majesty’s Privy Council to the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) as our final court of appeal,” Golding continued.

“However, the consciousness of the other side is not there yet, so let us begin with the things that we can agree on and move forward,” he added at the time.

But on Tuesday, Malahoo Forte also played a video of Golding speaking at a subsequent press conference after it became clear that the reform process had hit a roadblock.

“When Jamaica is moving out of the King’s yard we cannot have one foot in and one foot out a di yard. That would leave us neither fish nor fowl in another man’s yard; that can’t work,” he said, adding, “We [the PNP] will not support a phased approach to dealing with the matter of full decolonisation.”

Malahoo Forte told the House that, “The question that is now before us is how much more we can achieve for the remainder of the life of this Parliament.”

She described as the “contradiction of transition” a scenario where “people beg for change but get angry when the change requires work. People beg for change and are not prepared to show up and do the work”.

The latter remark appeared to be a dig at the PNP for boycotting the meetings of the joint select committee of the Parliament examining the Constitutional (Amendment) Republic Bill.

Golding and the PNP have insisted that if the Caribbean Court of Justice is not made Jamaica’s final appellate court at the same time as the country delinks from the monarchy, the PNP will not give its support to the process. The governing Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) is insisting that the reform will be done in phases.

Removing the deeply entrenched provisions of the constitution, like those related to the monarchy, require a two-thirds majority in both houses of Parliament, in addition to a referendum. While the JLP has a super majority in the House with 49 of the 63 seats, it falls short of the two-thirds majority it needs in the Senate where it has 13 seats to the PNP’s eight.

Malahoo Forte is insisting that the real dispute in the reform process centres on “who gets to lead, because that is what the real dispute in the constitutional reform work came down to”. She suggested that the Opposition is determined to accomplish a self-fulfilling prophesy that “nothing would have come of this work”.

As she was being shouted down by Opposition Members of Parliament for also suggesting that they just wanted to have their way, she quickly stated that both sides are accused of wanting to have their own way.

“Dem say we want wi way, we say unno want unno way, it just can’t work like that. What is required to go forward is a different exercise of leadership — and I don’t believe it’s going to come from over there,” she said to more murmurs from the Opposition benches.

“On this side we remain committed to furthering the goals of independence,” she said, while pointing out that the process, as set out in the constitution, is designed to be slow, and requires collaboration.

“I don’t believe it’s going to come from people who say one thing when it suits them and move away to something else when it suits them,” Malahoo Forte said.

Facing more objections from Opposition MPs, she remarked, “I don’t intend to quarrel it out.”