Mark Golding, the leader of the Opposition People’s National Party (PNP), is low on ammunition. Still, he continues to squander his diminishing political armaments. He is cornered. Like a drowning man, he is willing to clutch at even loose razor blades. Those who want his job see the blood in the water.

Golding sounds and looks like a man trapped in a self-created circus. His sloganeering about accountability, transparency, and integrity is shot. His victim-hood and persecution narrative has exploded. Golding’s own political hand-grenade caused the detonation.

Is Golding preventing the Osmond Theodore Fairclough party from becoming credible enough to take back the keys to Jamaica House? This is a crucial question he will have to convincingly answer in the upcoming PNP leadership contest.

I don’t foresee that Golding will cross the finish line first in the imminent leadership battle. Why? He has tried to sell himself as the tribune of the poor. He failed.

Folks have realised that much of his noise is just fuel for online fury. Golding’s political model of grievance has been shattered. Folks want peace, not more problems.

MISJUDGING THE TIMES

The maturing character of local politics is evidently not sufficiently understood by 89 Old Hope Road. The PNP continues to massively misjudge the times. Folks understand that grand speeches are plentiful in our politics. We also understand that practical, fund-able, and successful solutions are much rarer.

A majority understands that the biggest challenge of our times is not merely studying long-standing problems. We have set up numerous commissions and committees which have produced many reports that are now sitting on shelves gathering dust. Some of these commissions and committees have cost the public purse many millions.

Folks today know that the biggest challenge of our times is the timely, prudent, and efficient implementation of national solutions — solutions that enable a majority of Jamaicans to see tangible and sustained improvements.

Folks also understand that incessant and provocative propaganda, pointless political slugging matches, fake news, razzle-dazzle, populist rhetoric, theatrical deflections, and conspiracy theories do not advance the majority of Jamaicans.

What I call the “Jerry Springernisation” of Gordon House is an awful misuse of the people’s house — one that all well-thinking Jamaicans must be deeply concerned about. Jerry Springer himself admitted in an interview with Larry King some years ago that his show was “trash TV”. It is clear to me that the spectacle of “trash TV” is greatly admired by some in our Parliament. Frightening! Those ‘misleaders’ actively want a similar descent at 81 Duke Street.

I have been sounding the alarm in this space for some months now. Many other well-thinking Jamaicans have also been warning about the terrible monster slouching towards Kingston to be born. Pardon my taking slight liberties with W B Yeats’ seminal poem, The Second Coming.

Those of us who have knowledge must never sit idly by and allow our country to be destroyed. We have a duty to warn. The fact is, when those of us with a duty to warn ignore or abdicate that responsibility, we become the modern-day equivalents of Jonah in the Bible.

Applicable here, too, is the proverb: “There are none so blind as those who will not see.” Wilful ignorance is a sin. “If mi did know,” is always too late

LAME-DUCK PRESIDENT

I am not surprised that Golding has come out in full defence of those in the people’s house who are evidently off on a frightful frolic of their own. Well-thinking Jamaicans elected individuals to deliver representation that can and will improve our lives and enhance our livelihoods, while simultaneously putting in place the conditions that will enable all Jamaicans to ensure our children are better off, especially economically and socially.

It bears repeating: People elect a Government to get things done in a timely and cost-efficient manner. Individual benefits are crucial to the preservation of the social contract. In return for the certain and consistent satisfaction of individuals’ immediate and aspirational needs, citizens entrust their confidence to a Government. This adhesive of confidence glues society together.

It is evident to all but the conveniently blind that some of the newly elected Members of Parliament on the Opposition benches do not understand this fundamental obligation to the people. Rudeness, crudeness, lewdness, self-titillation, suggestive sexual showboating, tacit filibustering, disregard for standing orders and the Speaker’s chair, persistent grandstanding for the cameras, and performative braggadocio — which seems designed to provide content for social media bloggers and fuel for online fury — is not the job description that legislators in Gordon House have been given by the people.

Some elected and selected officials seem not to understand that they occupy privileged positions and, as such, need to be standard-bearers of discipline, decency, and decorum. No well-thinking Jamaican believes that any parliamentarian is a paragon of virtue. We know that Parliament is not Sunday school. We know that barbs and jives will be levelled in the cut and thrust of discussing the people’s business. But we do not expect a descent into standpipe brawls, uptown ‘cass-cass’, and the embrace of the lowest common denominator.

This kind of ‘misleadership’ does not improve the state of the pockets of the majority, nor does it increase the quality of meals on the tables of the vast majority of Jamaicans. The awful conduct of the ‘bad breed’, as they are called by some in the media, is a hindrance, not a help, to Jamaica’s advancement.

Ponder this: “Opposition Leader Mark Golding is pushing back at critics who are calling out the conduct of new Opposition parliamentarians.

“Golding told the Admiral Town Divisional Conference in Kingston on Sunday that he’s proud of the PNP’s new generation of parliamentarians.” (Nationwide News Network, July 6, 2026)

Members of the Opposition People’s National Party, led by Opposition Leader Mark Golding (fourth left), make their way to Gordon House on Duke Street for the ceremonial opening of Parliament. (Photo: Karl Mclarty)

This is a great harbinger. A leader who cannot discipline his followers is no longer a leader. Why has Golding been relegated to the role of follower? It is elementary, my dear Watson!

Golding knows that, in all likelihood, the upcoming PNP annual conference will be his last as president. He knows that men with “a lean and hungry look” — as Julius Caesar described those dangerously ambitious and dissatisfied persons who are “starved” for power and likely to plot against him, the comrade leader — have almost finished sharpening their daggers and cleaning their bayonets. Golding is a lame-duck president.

HEED THE WARNINGS

Golding has shown Jamaicans many times what a Jamaica with the PNP at Jamaica House would look like. We would be exceedingly foolish not to believe him.

His best bad ideas should scare well-thinking Jamaicans who want real growth and development. The signs are all there right before our very eyes that Golding is bad business for Jamaica. He says he is a ‘roots man’ (culturally savvy), but he plans to run Jamaica with the “topanaris”, the wealthy. He wants an easing of the zones of special operations (ZOSOs). He is soft on crime and the causes of crime. Some time ago he wanted the country to go on a $40-billion spending spree. Jamaica signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the United States in June 2026, creating a structured transit system for third-country nationals (TCNs). Golding says that if he were prime minister, he would embrace this accord. Yet he was front and centre in a recent demonstration against it.

He claims to be the czar of integrity, transparency, and accountability, yet his own actions — which I have detailed here previously — betray his supposed non-negotiable political values. I could go on.

Golding, in his desperation for the ‘video light’, has shown us who he is, again and again. I believe him.

He seems to thrive on the belief that confrontation will better energise his supporters. This is rank condescension.

Well-thinking Jamaicans must frown on this patent disrespect for our intelligence. Folks have demonstrated repeatedly that it does not require a degree to comprehend what is good for the development of this Rock. Previously, I have detailed here statements that Golding has made, especially on the political stump, which reek of condescension. He seems not to want peace, but problems.

Most Jamaicans want peace. “We don’t need no more troubles,” as Bob Marley famously sang. I said it in this space some months ago: The PNP needs an authentic visionary and disciplined strategist if it is to have a realistic chance of taking back the keys to Jamaica House. Golding does not fit the bill. Based on his repeated actions and inactions, it should be evident that Golding cannot help “Jamaica [become] the place of choice to live, work, raise families, and do business”.

Empty populism is dead. Informed pragmatism is what we need.

FOOLISH TACTIC

If you cannot control the facts, control the stage. If events threaten to overwhelm you, create bigger events. This is one of the antiquated tactics that populists continue to use to trick the unsuspecting.

Two Sundays ago, I said in my The Agenda column that, “When an Opposition that is bereft of fund-able and practical ideas cannot credibly attack a governing party on the state of the economy, the explosive matter of crime, or the prickly issue of ideology, it resorts to performative politics.”

Performative politics can fool some of the people some of the time. It will never fool the majority all of the time.

The results of the last two local government elections and three general elections clearly show that a majority of those who voted were not convinced by yesterday’s men and women and their display of an appalling lack of intellectual control, especially on the hustings. The PNP’s tactic of using yesterday’s men and women to indulge in character assassinations was rejected. Folks are maturing.

Consider this: ‘Dayton Campbell says sorry — PNP general secretary settles defamation suit with Vaz and others with apology and legal fees.’ This banner headline is a reminder that lack of intellectual control and the nasty indulgence in character assassinations are costly. Words are not always wind, as some locally believe.

The Jamaica Observer item of July 9, 2026 said, among other things: “A last-minute agreement hammered out on Wednesday between attorneys representing People’s National Party (PNP) General Secretary Dr Dayton Campbell, Energy Minister Daryl Vaz, and two co-claimants, narrowly averted a six-day defamation trial following a suit filed in 2023.

“Vaz, former Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) Member of Parliament (MP) for St Ann North Western Othneil Lawrence, and Member of Parliament for St Thomas Western James Robertson (JLP) had all filed lawsuits against Campbell over comments he made while naming them during a PNP meeting in Clarendon on July 27, 2023.

“The allegations in that broadside were primarily levelled at Vaz, but all three claimed they were ‘false, malicious and defamatory’.”

For 40 years Vaz and his family have suffered from a vicious smear campaign by some in high and low places, both here at home and abroad. Whispering campaigns designed to inflict maximum hurt and pain have been used to systematically vilify Vaz. Some are evidently prepared to reach into the darkest and murkiest parts of the underbelly of our politics to, among other things, secure political advantage, diminish, delegitimise, and minimise Vaz’s rich and tangible contribution to the advance of Jamaica, and dwarf the man and his family in the eyes of Jamaicans. There is overwhelming evidence to show that when Vaz leaves Gordon House he will have left Jamaica in a much better state than he found it. Many others cannot and will not be able to claim that distinction. Vaz is a credit to local politics.

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

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