The Opposition People’s National Party (PNP) will feel that it has a legitimate political issue on which to pillory the Government in defence of the people whose illegal buildings were demolished last week at Bernard Lodge in St Catherine.

After all, political parties are about the business of winning elections, and débâcles such as the one at Clifton are par for the course for an Opposition party seeking power after two straight terms in the political wilderness.

In that respect, Generation 2000 (G2K), the young professional affiliate of the governing Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), is overstating the case a bit in describing as “vulgar, unprincipled and disappointing”, utterances attributed to PNP President Mark Golding that his party would facilitate legal action against the Government over the demolitions.

That takes us back to April this year when Mr Golding and the PNP came out in defence of squatters in Little Bay and Brighton in Westmoreland.

But then, that’s the problem, isn’t it? The age-old, seemingly unsolvable issue of squatting has been made into a partisan political scrimmage, as each party in Opposition milks it for what it’s worth.

G2K actually makes more sense when it says: “[T]here is significant work to be done in the area of making available affordable housing to the Jamaican people, and we continue to add to the call for broader focus to be made on land reform. The draft policy for land reform has been lagging… and Government should complete the process expeditiously.”

It shouldn’t be difficult to agree that the matter of squatting has been with us forever. The British made sure, by law, that the freed Jamaicans could not own lands, to force them to continue working on the sugar plantations after Emancipation.

Even the indentured labourers from India were offered five acres of land each, if they chose to stay in Jamaica, at the end of the indentured labour contract. The Chinese too. Hence today they are generally better off than the Africans. No one can blame them, of course. They got a better deal and they took it.

Today, anyone can own land if one can afford it. But only a relatively few privileged ones can afford it. Many of the poor can’t afford to even rent. How is this problem to be solved?

Many of us who escaped poverty did so with the help of free education, partially funded by taxes paid by these same poor people. We might consider that we all have a hand in helping to find the answer.

The PNP of the 1970s espoused the view that the Government should facilitate the ease of access to ownership of property; hence, programmes such as Land Lease and ramped-up land titling.

The JLP followed a similar ideological path. For example, Land Administration and Management Programme (LAMP) came about to champion land titling. People who have been living on lands for 12 years where no one is disputing it can get titles. LAMP merged with the National Land Agency in 2018 to create the Land Administration and Management Division.

Both major political parties have, however, sought to benefit from squatting by creating communities of voters to ensure their victory at the polls, escalating the problem by making it a social, economic, and political issue.

It will take a transformative approach, but if the parties mean Jamaica any good, they would work together to resolve the problem of squatting.