The outcomes of the last three general elections show concretely that the majority of Jamaicans who voted feared having the People’s National Party (PNP) “ah run things” (being in control, being the boss, having authority over the nation’s purse, and by extension managing Jamaica’s national affairs).

Fear is an important and very basic human feeling caused by real or imagined threats, pain, or danger.

Fear is one of several primary factors that greatly help many voters decide whom to choose to manage national affairs in particular.

Those who seek elected office often dismiss voters’ fears as illegitimate and far-fetched.

This is a terrible error.

The fears of voters are invariably informed by lived experiences.

Those experiences are often justifiably used as predictors of future actions, unless there are radical changes in present behaviours which prove over time that there is a paradigm shift from the past.

Should voters be pilloried for how and why our decision curves are constructed? No! Seekers of high and low public and related offices need to take time to understand these constructions and realistically assuage them through genuine actions.

There are thousands of Jamaicans, old and young, who have bone-chilling fears of a future PNP Administration.

The Mark Golding-led PNP, which was defeated in the most recent local government elections and the general election of September 3, 2025, would do well to take the time to try to understand these real fears and swiftly let go of their silly notion that “Jamaica is still PNP country.” Political parties bring long-standing habits to public office.

These habits are the fuel of the behaviours of political parties.

Understand this: Even when a political party gets new leadership, that does not mean voters automatically forget the habits of that party.

A major political party, like the PNP, which has governed Jamaica for a combined 31 years across three separate periods since Independence in 1962, is not a tabula rasa or blank slate.

It has a history.

In the minds of thousands of Jamaicans who vote, that history is a chequered one.

No voter has a prior obligation to forget that chequered past.

The PNP, instead, has the prior obligation to convince Jamaicans voters that the PNP’s past is truly past.

THREE GIANT FEARS

Many Jamaicans, especially those who vote, have three primary reasons for their well-founded fears regarding the PNP forming a future Administration.

#1) The PNP has a history of rewarding spectacle over service, grievance over good governance, and notoriety over duty.

I have previously detailed the painful economic failures of the PNP’s 31 years at the wheel.

To date, the PNP has not apologised for the great costly and stinging economic miseries which it has dumped upon this country.

No member has apologised for bringing Jamaica to the edge of a great financial precipice in the 1970s.

The PNP’s rank economic incompetence reduced Jamaica to the laughing stock of the region. Jamaica became the “poor man of the Caribbean”. Our country became severely indebted.

We ended up owing money to many countries, including rogue states like Iran at the time.

Jamaica was hardpressed to pay for imports of crude oil, medicines needed by hundreds of critically ill patients, food items such as grains, mainstays for farmers such as fertilisers, and vital equipment for even the factories that stayed.

A worse nightmare was visited upon Jamaicans in the 1990s. It took Jamaica 30 years to fully recover from the 18½ years of economic mismanagement between 1989 and 2007.

These failures tragically culminated in the Financial Sector Adjustment Company Limited (FINSAC), a government entity established in Jamaica in January 1997. Jamaica was stripped of 42 per cent of our gross domestic product (GDP).

Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness recently noted that, “It’s only last year that we were able to reclaim what we lost and bring back our debt to GDP to 70 per cent, which is what it was before FINSAC.” (Jamaica Observer, September 28, 2026) The businesses of thousands of especially young, black Jamaicans were ruined.

Some owners committed suicide. In the 70s some 20,000 Jamaicans — some of our best and brightest — fled their native land because fear was used as a tool of exile. The PNP has yet to apologise.

The economic wasteland which the PNP presided over between 1972 and 1980 and again between 1989 and 2007 is still fresh in the minds of especially a critical mass.

The PNP still carries the millstone of economic mismanagement around its neck today because of its absurd preoccupation with spectacle, grievance, and notoriety when it is at Jamaica House.

This is a morbid fear in the minds of many Jamaicans today. Recall the PNP’s relentless attack on The Gleaner in the 1970s.

While the PNP was in power, noted journalists like Wilmot “Motty” Perkins were dragged before Parliament. Perkins and his wife were repeatedly victimised.

Her radio serial, Dulcimina, which had close to 500,000 listeners (one in four Jamaicans at the time) tuning in, was cancelled.

Abominable and anti-democratic malice was also cruelly and systematically applied to other journalists, for example John Hearne, David DaCosta, and Urban S Leandro, the iconic and legendary editorial cartoonist who worked for the Jamaica Gleaner for over 50 years.

While the PNP pilloried press freedom, it was busy promoting spectacles and dodges while poverty was romanticised for the majority.

The PNP leadership’s public disdain for the elites was merely a camouflaged distraction from deep-seated economic blight. Folks fear a return.

#2) There is a time-honoured practice in liberal democratic tradition that governing parties are obliged to help those who will never applaud them.

The PNP does not seem to understand this sacred tradition, as I see it. Recall the Pickersgill Committee of Political Purity.

It was set up to screen candidates to ensure that appointees were of “impeccable political purity”. In the 1970s the civil service was packed with individuals whose sole competency was socialist propaganda.

This was the mind of the PNP speaking in the 1970s: “The minister of national mobilisation, D K Duncan, declared in Parliament, in 1976, several years before Delano was born, ‘in a Ministry of National Mobilisation in a socialist Government, it is very difficult to employ somebody who is not a socialist.

D K Duncan

I make no apology. Every single employee in the Ministry of National Mobilisation, his (sic) credentials as a democratic socialist are clear and pure’.” (The Gleaner, June 26, 2011) This was the mind of the PNP speaking in the 1990s.

Ponder this from then: PNP Chairman Robert Pickersgill, “We believe it is best for us [the PNP] to form the Government; therefore, anything that will lead us or cause us to be in power is best for the PNP and best for the country.” Anything excludes nothing.

The PNP’s leadership has yet to distance itself from this frightening statement or the rotten underlying philosophy deeply embedded in it.

Has that mindset been abandoned? I don’t think so! Recently a voice note was heard in which an elected official, who is paid by taxpayers, and another high-ranking member of the PNP discussed how national recovery efforts and the head of the national recovery programmes may be systematically disfigured, dismantled, and destroyed.

To date these individuals have not been publicly sanctioned by the leadership of the PNP.

This scandal presented a golden opportunity for PNP President Mark Golding to demonstrate a new direction for the PNP. Golding neither said what should have been said nor did what should have been done.

Golding evidently did not understand what needed doing. It is not unreasonable to deduce that the mind of the PNP has yet to undergo the crucial 180- degree turn which it desperately needs if it is to eliminate this primary point of fear about it.

I believe there is a deeply rooted “othering culture” in the PNP which targets opponents as enemies.

The snippets from Dr D K Duncan in the 1970s, Robert Pickersgill in the 1990s, and the recent surreptitious voice note are not mere coincidence, as I see it; rather they are evidence of something deeply antithetical to respected Western liberal democratic practices.

There is a critical mass of Jamaican voters for whom the reputation of a party is very important when choosing who to trust with our national affairs.

Leaders need to understand that they bear direct responsibility for their precise words, but, more importantly, for the realities which their words create on the ground.

Relatedly, recently Prime Minister Holness, while speaking with senior party members, warned that being enamoured with the trappings of office should be shunned.

Leadership in the PNP should listen keenly also. Leaders who love applause but not the labour, and who do not understand that public office has first claim on their time, are not good for this country. Public office is not a mere decorative ribbon and it must never be.

#3) Democratic socialism: This ideology remains a great puzzle for many people locally, including many who publicly say they are firm adherents of it.

Ten socialists, when asked to say precisely what democratic socialism is, will often give ten varied explanations. Whatever democratic socialism is, I know what it is not. It is not a success.

International benchmarks tell us there is no successful socialist country on Earth. None! I seriously doubt there will ever be any, either. And, again, for those who are quick to point to the Scandinavian countries, don’t.

Those countries are not socialist. I long ago dispelled that myth in this space. As a matter of fact, during the period when some of the Scandinavian nations experimented with socialism there was near social and economic ruin.

Numerous scholarly works from globally renowned authors have shown that socialism is, among other things, antithetical to human nature. I encourage my readers to peruse the groundbreaking book Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis by Ludwig von Mises.

It brilliantly dispels the economic viability of socialism. The Road to Serfdom is a seminal work by Friedrich Hayek, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974.

It is also a must-read for those who want a very in-depth understanding of the “samfie” ideology which is called socialism. Mention democratic socialism and many Jamaicans remember the time in Jamaica when there were massive outages and shortages of various types.

To many Jamaicans, socialism is the embarrassing relative at the Christmas party. Everyone knows who invited him and few want to sit beside him. As I see it, the intractable weakness of socialism is that it divides citizens into two groups — the people and the elite.

Close examination shows that socialists “topanaris” are really the very people they pretend to hate.

The PNP needs a spring cleaning. There is a critical mass of Jamaicans who are scared of who the PNP are and what they will likely do if they form a future Administration. These are real not imagined fears…

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