Elections have consequences. The people choose, and the chosen govern. However, leaders must ask: What exactly did the people choose? And why? By what standards must the governed judge us? Is it by how efficiently we govern, or by what we actually achieve and deliver on their behalf?

Consider the arithmetic of Andrew Holness’s three victories. In 2016, the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) won by 3,549 votes of the almost 870,000 cast — while 9,875 ballots were rejected. In 2020, the 49-14 seat landslide came on 37.85 per cent turnout. In 2025, the margin was 11,307 — while 13,705 ballots were rejected with just under 40 per cent voter participation. Twice, the margin of victory was smaller than the rejected ballots. In none of the general elections held between 2016 and 2025 did more than 49 per cent of the electorate vote. A “minority majority” commanding the House of Representatives on the consent of less than 20 per cent of eligible voters. Yet, it governs with the swagger of a landslide.

But first, an acknowledgement. Politics is difficult — harder still amid chronic cynicism and distrust — and Andrew Holness, a young man of my generation, stepped forward. Undoubtedly, Holness means well. His personal and family sacrifices, his commitment to country, must be genuinely commended. We should resist the inelegant urge of throwing out the baby with the bathwater when assessing his contribution to Jamaica.

Holness is a touchstone of fortitude, political courage, and stick-to-itiveness. Three consecutive terms — a first for a JLP leader; his place is cemented in the annals of history. This column is not about his character. It is about the record. A decade of Holness in the domains where governments are judged, and whether the doctrine he now preaches can deliver what efficiency has not.

To be fair — and fairness is not the enemy of frankness — the fiscal ledger carries real credits. Public debt from 140 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) to under 65 per cent, International Monetary Fund (IMF) programmes completed, inflation anchored, unemployment at an all-time low of 3.7 per cent, murders down sharply. These are achievements, and any honest account records them.

Since 1989, continuity rather than reinvention has been the defining doctrine of the State’s political economy; what evolves is merely the innovation — the ‘stylistics and mechanics’ — of the governing paradigm. Therefore, the predicate must be stated because the contest over credit matters. What Holness inherited in March 2016 was the IMF facility and the primary surplus regime of the PNP Administration led by Portia Simpson Miller.

Peter Phillips was finance minister, but she was prime minister — primus inter pares, who owned the programme and spent her political capital implementing it. Debt was already falling from 147 per cent; the programme was on track through all 13 reviews; and the 2015 PetroCaribe buyback had retired US$3.2 billion owed to Venezuela for US$1.5 billion — near 50 cents on the dollar, hailed by the IMF.

But the political economy beneath is narrow and brittle. Over 30 years, real per capita GDP grew at barely one per cent a year — among the slowest rates in the developing world. Tourism carries 22 per cent of GDP; bauxite and alumina earnings fell almost 24 per cent in 2025, and the Government is moving to divest its 45 per cent Jamalco stake.

The World Bank projects a 0.8 per cent contraction for 2026; inflation sits at 7.9 per cent. Jamaica suffers the worst brain drain in Latin America and the Caribbean. And the 2026 Voluntary National Review delivers the starkest effectiveness verdict of all: Of 17 United Nation Sustainable Development Goals, zero achieved, zero on track.

Against this background, Prime Minister Holness’s current doctrine must be examined. At the Commonwealth summit in Antigua, he told his counterparts that governments must treat “efficiency as a resource”, that “the aim of the game now is delivery — how fast can governments deliver benefits to their electorate.” But as a singularity of focus it is seriously flawed because it mistakes the instrument for the objective.

Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things — and being judged on whether they worked.

Africa offers the distinction in sharp relief. Rwanda began in 1994 with its economy halved, poverty at 78 per cent, and its institutions in ruins. What followed was not an efficiency programme, but an effectiveness doctrine.

Vision 2020 first stabilised, then built, then transformed. The outcomes are the evidence — poverty from 64 to 27 per cent, life expectancy from 49 to 67 years, health insurance covering 85 per cent of the population. Rwanda paired that effectiveness with efficiency — digital governance, among Africa’s cleanest corruption scores. Effectiveness chose the ends; efficiency served them. That is the order Holness reverses.

The evidence is not Rwanda alone. Botswana, a democracy, turned diamond wealth into 5.3 per cent per capita growth across four decades — schools, clinics, and roads, not just reserves. Mauritius, a small island like Jamaica, transformed itself from a sugar colony into a manufacturing and financial hub with high literacy and quality health care. Effectiveness is not an Asian monopoly, and it does not require authoritarianism. It requires what Jamaica’s Vision 2030 promised — the discipline to judge governments by outcomes.

Set that against the Jamaican experience. In the last 32 years Jamaica has made real progress — the debt turnaround, wider school enrolment, new highways. But in the four domains in which State effectiveness is ultimately measured — health care, infrastructure, education, and constitutional reform — we are still behind. And behind is a verdict on effectiveness, not effort.

Health care first. The gains are real: HIV mortality has gone down almost half since 2000, 99 per cent of births attended by skilled personnel, regional certification for eliminating mother-to-child HIV transmission. But last week the health minister accepted a World Bank review’s verdict: Non-communicable diseases cause almost four in five deaths, maternal and neonatal deaths remain persistently high, and too much money goes to expensive late-stage hospital care.

“We must obtain more value from the investments we have already made,” he said. Effectiveness, in his own words. The nurses Jamaica trains still staff foreign hospitals. A system that cannot keep its healers cannot heal.

Infrastructure tells the same story in concrete. Highways have been built — real development. But the Auditor General has repeatedly flagged the repair and maintenance of road, water, education, and health infrastructure — low accountability for approved budgets, non-compliance with procurement rules, persistent corruption concerns in maintenance. Development without maintenance is not effectiveness; it is a ribbon-cutting followed by decay.

Education had the slowest harvest. Teacher shortages reached 7,000 in 2023; resignations have eased since, but subject gaps persist, and a third of rural schools are understaffed; and school infrastructure poor. A nation that cannot staff its classrooms cannot staff its future.

And constitutional reform — the unfinished business of the Jamaican experience. Sixty-four years after political independence, the head of State is still the British monarch, and the final court still sits in London. The republic bill awaits its referendum — the mission invoked by St James Southern Member of Parliament Nekeisha Burchell. The courts have had to mark the limits themselves: In 2013, then-Opposition Leader Andrew Holness required prospective JLP senators to sign undated, pre-signed resignation letters as a condition of their appointment. And, in February 2015 the Constitutional Court ruled unanimously that the demand for, and use of, those letters was unconstitutional, contrary to public policy, unlawful, and ‘null and void. The national identification system (NIDS) was struck down in court, the state of public emergency (SOE) detentions ruled unlawful. No efficiency metric can substitute for that effectiveness — judicial effectiveness.

Then the storm tested everything. Hurricane Melissa made landfall on October 28, 2025 as a Category 5 system with 45 reported deaths, and US$12.2 billion in damage. A year later the Auditor General found the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM) had spent 1.8 per cent of cash donations. The prime minister admitted his frustration at the pace of housing restoration. Against this backdrop Beenie Man asked the obvious question on ITV News — the money comes in, “you nuh see where it guh…” — and Holness answered not the question but the questioner: A “lie told on Jamaica”, artists “tearing down the country”. The irony he missed is that Brand Jamaica is more than its stable political democracy. It is wrapped up and curated in the music, culture, athleticism, sought-after professionals, and in the diplomacy of Michael Manley and Hugh Shearer. Brand Jamaica was built by the very artists he lectures, and its commercial beneficiary is the hospitality industry. Buju Banton’s reply is the epitaph: “We are the Brand Jamaica… We have been pushing Brand Jamaica long before you enter politics.”

The pattern extends. The “saboteurs” charge against public servants — which the unions told him to prove or withdraw — was distasteful and shameful. You know the shine is rubbing off a politician when, despite the bravado, he must spend his time explaining and defending. He is squandering his political capital.

True, the Jamaican electorate is forgiving — the law of recency and the halo effect move votes — but that forgiveness is not a blank cheque, and he may be disqualifying himself without knowing it. He needs to learn to speak loudly in the language of silence. Alas, in a brazen display of arrogance, on September 27 he told the JLP he will seek a fourth term. To treat politics as an endless tactical and strategic fight is a dangerous embrace because that treatment mistakes winning for governing.

Power belongs to the people. Burchell’s question hangs over it all: “What did we solve has to be a harder test than how many elections did we win?”

So, we return to where we began: Elections have consequences. The consequence of 2016, 2020, and 2025 is a Government of formidable fiscal discipline and brittle foundations; efficient in its processes, unproven in its outcomes. Jamaica does not need a faster machine; it needs one that arrives somewhere — healthier people, maintained roads, staffed schools, a completed constitution.

Efficiency is a resource. Effectiveness is the point. Elections have consequences — and so does the difference.