We’re being subsidised with our own money
Dear Editor,
There are three perspectives from which we can consider the co-pay subsidy on electricity bills which the Ministry of Finance will start paying this June and continue for about three months.
Firstly, although any ease in our financial burden is appreciated, why is the Jamaican Government making such a meal of giving us back monies which we have paid through taxes and fees to them, and would not these monies have been used towards some other genuine and significant good of the nation and it’s people anyway? If such is the case, then what shall become of those hopefully important areas from which those monies were diverted?
Secondly, Prime Minister Andrew Holness was mistaken in saying that he had never witnessed the kind of civil unrest that he had seen occur in the past month or so when the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) was in Opposition, and therefore seemed to be insinuating that Opposition’s politicking was to be blamed for the back-to-back industrial actions and street demonstrations.
Those of us who are old enough to have experienced the gas riots of April 1999 — supposedly stemming from opposition to the P J Patterson-led People’s National Party (PNP)-run Government’s proposal of a new gas tax and the social “horrors” that were expected to accompany it — would be taken aback by Holness’s attempt to defend his political ego.
Those riots were the greatest of Jamaican upheavals to hit us since the bloody and dark ones of the 1980 General Election.
Mr Patterson eventually licked his wounds, retracted on plans to implement the new gas tax, only to have a JLP-run Government subsequently implement that same tax, without a single protest. In fact, this tax shall contribute significantly to this same electricity subsidy.
Lastly, as in Jesus’s parable of the talents, this Government should be scolded for merely giving us back that which was entrusted to them just ‘so-so suh’. What we should be getting is cheaper-than-it-would-have-been electricity or at least shifting into emergency energy-related programmes.
The difference between one’s image and fulfilling one’s potential must be returned to the fore, for we have been wasting too much of our resources, including time, on the former. Instead of three mere months of subsidy, it should’ve been three decades.
Andre O Sheppy
Norwood, St James
astrangely@outlook.com