KINGSTON, Jamaica — Opposition Member of Parliament for St James Southern Nekeisha Burchell is questioning what major national problem Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) would seek to solve if returned to office for a fourth term.

Burchell posed the question as she made her contribution to the 2026/27 State of the Constituency Debate in the House of Representatives on Tuesday.

She argued that it was the business of every generation to accomplish major tasks. She pointed to former Premier Norman Manley, noting that his generation’s mission was to win self-government.

“Mission accomplished for my generation,” she said before adding that every generation should know its mission.

Burchell then told the House that, “I read this morning that the prime minister has signalled his intention to seek a fourth term to ‘do what is right by the people’. That is his right. My next question is not aiming to be facetious. I’m asking as a newcomer, navigating representation. What great Jamaican problem would another term be organised to solve?”

With Holness and the JLP into a third consecutive term in Government, Burchell remarked that, “Maybe that mission exists and I have not yet understood it.”

Continuing, she said, “I ask this Parliament and myself. Because what did we solve has to be a harder test than how many elections did we win?”

A first term MP, Burchell said Hurricane Melissa makes that question more urgent. Yet, she suggested that it remains business as usual.

“One thing that troubled me during the budget exercise was that the budget felt remarkably routine for a country only months removed from catastrophe. There was Melissa spending and reconstruction effort. My concern was what the crisis was going to cause us to do differently,” Burchell said.

She told the Parliament that what has materialised is that, “Government’s own language had skipped recovery and moved ‘from resilience to resurgence.”

She said Melissa was a stress test of how Jamaica plans. “Can we move capital quickly? Get farmers producing? Businesses earning? Rebuild stronger?”

Burchell insisted that Melissa should change the development model.

“We love to call Jamaicans resilient. And Jamaicans are. But sometimes resilience sounds like a sophisticated way of saying: dem will find a way. Farmer loses everything? He finds a way. A woman loses the freezer that feeds her family? She finds a way,” she said.

The Opposition MP argued that the resilience of the Jamaican people is not proof of the resilience of Jamaican systems and instead should be designed into the economy.

“Jamaicans do not need to become better at surviving. Jamaica needs to become better at working. Merely getting back to where Melissa found us cannot be the ambition. Recovery must become productivity. And productivity does not mean asking Jamaicans to work harder,” she said.

Burchell pointed to a report this week by World Population Review that places Jamaica’s average work week at 43 hours, the Caribbean’s longest, compared with 34 hours for Barbados.

“I am not turning one statistic into an economic theory. But long hours are not the same thing as high productivity. A Jamaican can leave home at 5:30 in the morning, spend hours travelling, work all day and spend another two hours getting home. Exhaustion is not productivity. The question is: How do we make each hour of Jamaican work worth more?” said Burchell.

Burchell said rural productivity should extend beyond agriculture to include manufacturing, tourism, technology, professional services, creative industries and small businesses.