What will a third term at Jamaica House for the Andrew Michael Holness-led Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) mean materially and in a sustained manner for the majority of especially ordinary Jamaicans? And what would a switch to the Mark Jefferson Golding-led People’s National Party (PNP) mean materially and in a sustained manner for the majority of especially ordinary Jamaicans? Stay or switch that is the clear choice. Yours and all Jamaica’s future is at stake.

Rational answers to the mentioned questions are best predicated on the past and present actions and/or inactions of the JLP and the PNP. Past and present behaviours are the best determiners of future conduct.

Last Sunday, Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness announced a general election to be held on September 3, 2025. This election will be our 19th since universal adult suffrage in 1944. I have said it here before, but it bears repeating: “Concerning our politics the “mi nuh able” posture is not safe or sensible. To sit on our verandahs, in our living rooms, in bars, and/or in other social and religious sanctuaries and romanticise, encourage, preach divorcement from voting in elections is self-defeating. No well-thinking Jamaican must exclude him/herself from the critical democratic process of selecting which party manages our country’s affairs. When we do so we leave our futures in the hands of those who will gladly sell their votes and our country’s future for a mess of pottage and/or worse.” All well-thinking Jamaicans need to vote.

Our country has been caught in a stop-and-go trap — more so a stopping than going state — regarding social, political, and economic growth and development for more than half the years since Jamaica became politically independent in 1962. Consequently, we have achieved less than half of what we could have and needed to achieve in 63 years.

We are 18 days away from election day. We can either choose to advance or regress. To me, the clear choice is between an unusable past; meaning a resurrection of the dreaded 1970s and 90s versus the present modernisation of Jamaica’s education system, roads, hospitals, courts, markets, security services, civil services, critical human rights and environmental protections, Internet infrastructure, port and shipping facility expansions, etc. Choose!

CHOOSE WISELY!

In order to make the best choice there are some very critical questions which all well-thinking Jamaicans must dispassionately answer before they make their ‘X’, 17 days from today.

For starters: Which party has the better record regarding the gainful management of our economy? Based on ample and irrefutable evidence which I previously presented here, the answer to that question is undeniably the JLP.

“The PNP has presided over the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich since slavery,” said Deacon Ronald Thwaites, former minister of education. Ample and incontrovertible evidence regarding the wrecking of the Jamaican economy in the 90s prove that Thwaites spoke the truth.

The fact is, whenever the PNP is at Jamaica House unemployment is high, usually between 14 per cent and 20 per cent; crime is almost always spiralling; social decadence is a runaway train; and hundreds of local businesses falter and die. Recall that some 45,000 small and medium-sized businesses folded in the 90s largely because of the high interest rate policy of the P J Patterson-led Administration with Dr Omar Davies as minister of finance and planning.

Jamaica’s black business class was almost totally decimated. Business confidence was shattered. Some Jamaicans committed suicide because their life’s investments were massacred by high interest rates and related imbecilic policies. Overt and closet socialists, some with a track record of failure in Government, took a wrecking ball to the economy and our lives. The economic devastation which was needlessly imposed on thousands of ordinary Jamaicans in the 90s was a rehash of the economic craziness which characterised the 1970s. Perhaps the biggest loss of the 90s was the silencing of national self-confidence. We are still recovering.

“Why say these thing now,” Higgins, some will protest.

National Hero Marcus Garvey warned us, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I agree. Deuteronomy 30: 19, says, “I call heaven and Earth as witnesses against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing. Therefore, choose life, so that you and your descendants may live.”

Choosing life, among other things, must mean continued reduction in crime, in particular murders.

Consider this: “St James has recorded a 67 per cent drop in murders so far this year. Just one murder was reported in May, with 22 cases overall compared to 68 during the same period in 2024.” (
CVM TV, June 29, 2025) This massive reduction matters greatly because St James nay well be the murder capital of the Caribbean. At the time of writing, murders had declined by 41 per cent. This means 297 fewer Jamaicans have been murdered this year compared to 2024. Billions have been invested in the provision of equipment and training in the last nine years.

Today, the Jamaican State is better able to protect her borders and her people. Admittedly, we are not at the point where any self-respecting Jamaican can be satisfied. But Jamaica has made good strong strides.

The PNP loves to talk about equity. They are good at talk. Equity cannot be advanced if the country is broke. PNP administrations have emptied the national cash box ‘on rapid’, as we say locally, on nearly every occasion they have been given the keys to Jamaica House. Why? Among other things, like typical socialists, the PNP is preoccupied with tax and spend and borrowing from Peter to pay Paul while they pull wool over the eyes of, especially, the unsuspecting with the deadly money illusion. The PNP, simply don’t get it — that the only place consumption comes before production is in the dictionary.

One does not have to have a degree in economics to realise that the creation of equity is dependent on fiscal soundness in the national economy. No amount of ideological bombast, no amount of professing of love for the poor, no amount of embrace of new and/or old variations of socialism, of which Mark Golding says he is a convert, can cause the conditions of the majority of especially ordinary Jamaicans to materially improve in a sustained manner if there is the absence of national fiscal soundness.

Incidentally, it was Golding who told this newspaper that he was a socialist. One of the greatest ideological casualties of the 20th century was socialism. There is no successful socialist economy anywhere on this Earth. Believe it, Jamaica came very close to becoming what Cuba and Venezuela are today. It would be suicidal to once again snap defeat from the jaws of victory.

GENERATIONAL IMPORTANCE

Jamaica’s present modernisation trajectory will come to a screeching and terrible halt if the present macro-economic gains are destroyed — as happened in the 1970s and again in the 1990s. After many years of inflation and stagflation; after many years of being seen as the poor man of the Caribbean; after many years of the majority of ordinary Jamaicans consistently getting poorer and less respected, Jamaica is finally on the right road.

Some among us are terrified that opportunities which enable the majority of especially ordinary Jamaicans to escape from feasting on crumbs have been and are being quickly created. In my The Agenda piece of March 31, 2024, I noted, among other things: “I have said here more than once that some among us are mightily upset that they no longer control the levers which formally enabled them to determine what the majority think and how often. They had better get accustomed to this reality. It is an inconvenient truth that corrosive social snobbery and classism, put on steroids during slavery and colonialism, still abound. There are some among us who fervently believe that the Tainos bequeathed Jamaica to them and they only are entitled to ‘run things’. They had better get it into their heads that those days are over.” I stand by those sentiments.

“OK, Higgins, so why is it so important for Jamaica to continue on the present road of modernisation,” some will inquire?

Here is the explanation:

Some political scholars posit that unless a political party can govern for at least three cycles, 15 years in our case, at minimum and/or longer, it cannot achieve transformative changes. I agree. Recall the PNP returned to power in February 1989. Michael Manley by then had discarded the Kariba suit for the Western-styled jacket and tie. In 1992, citing health reasons, Manley stepped down as prime minister and PNP president. In March, 1992, P J Patterson became PNP president and prime minister. The PNP, held the keys to Jamaica House until they were given the order of the boot in 2007. Patterson won three-straight general elections. He got ‘brawta’ also. Jamaicans were married to the ‘two-term syndrome’ prior.

What did most Jamaicans get from the PNP’s 18½ years in office? We got poorer, weaker, and less respected. Our economy went on life support. In the 90s, for example, while the economies of our major trading partners and the world economy at large flourished, ours floundered. In the 90s, the majority of Caribbean economies grew by an average of between three per cent and five per cent, ours nosedived.

Mark Golding has been the leader of the Opposition and PNP president for nearly five years. Scientific poll findings show that Golding is yet to convince the majority of Jamaicans that the future will not be the past if the PNP were to form the Administration. Jamaicans have an obligation, therefore, to assume that a future PNP Administration will be a mere repetition of horrific times past. We saw that move before. It was scary.

As I see it, the JLP needs a third term to complete the establishing of a vital standard/order in which modernisation becomes a national benchmark regarding the management of the affairs of Jamaica. Prime Minister Andrew Holness says he is committed to continuing and speeding up the modernisation of Jamaica. Were modernisation to become a national benchmark, modernisation itself would likely become almost immune to political challenge irrespective of the party in power. As I see it, that would be the biggest win for especially ordinary Jamaicans since political independence in 1962.

Here is an illustration of how important a positive national benchmark is and how it directs national politics and political leadership. The National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom was established by the Labour Government led by Prime Minister Clement Attlee in 1946. Aneurin Bevan, as minister of health in Attlee’s Government, played a key role in its creation. The NHS was officially launched on July 5, 1948, with the aim of providing health care that was free at the point of use for all residents of the UK. I seriously doubt any political party in Britain could win a national election today and/or in the near future were it to propose the shelving of the NHS. The NHS has become a national and transformative benchmark. Some scholars say it is nearly immune to political overthrow. Political parties in the UK dear not fiddle with this national benchmark of British modernisation. It’s life to Brits.

LOOKING FORWARD

We cannot afford to treat our politics like the children’s game of hide-and-seek in which one or more players hide and the others have to look for them. We cannot legitimately recite the “if mi did know…” cultural excuse any longer when economic and especially social dread is meted out to us by inept administrations.

We live in the Information Age. Those who want to know have information at the click of a button. We have a duty to know, if not for ourselves, certainly for our children.

Yours and Jamaica’s future is at stake. Albert Einstein told us decades ago that if we keep doing the same thing repeatedly and hope for different results we are indeed mad. As I see it, the PNP has not divorced itself from its tax and spend, borrow and spend, redistribution minus creation of wealth formula which nearly plunged this country over a giant precipice several times. This is a great harbinger. We best ‘tek sleep and mark death’.

Garfield Higgins is an educator and journalist. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or higgins160@yahoo.com.

PNP President Mark Golding addressing Comrades at the party’s Old Hope Road headquarters on Sunday after Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness announced the general election date.