Peter Espeut | Running on your record

Here’s the thing! When you have been in government for nine years, and you have to face the electorate in a general election, you must expect to be evaluated on your record over the previous nine years, and not on what you promise to do in Chapter 2 (or 3 or 4 or 5) – when you are elected for an additional term.

During campaigning for the last election, promises were made and undertakings were given about what would be achieved. Parties in power must be expected to be judged on whether they did what they promised to do five years ago. And responsible journalists will do the research, and hold them to account.

If you promised to so something five or 10 years ago – especially with much fanfare – and didn’t do it, why should anyone believe that in a new term you will do what you are now promising to do during this campaign?

Following the Trump model (or maybe Trump followed their model!) after the 2016 election the Holness government gathered around itself Jamaican billionaires Adam Stewart and Michael Lee-Chin and promised that within four years Jamaica will be growing at five per cent per annum.

It hasn’t happened! Just this last quarter, Jamaica emerged from a technical recession (two consecutive quarters of “negative growth” – a euphemism for economic decline) with a massive 0.8 per cent growth.

Applause please!

Very few parties seeking re-election can resist making new and grander promises, putting forward a raft of new policies and programmes to be implemented when re-elected. It seems to me that the minds of politicians in power are most fertile six months before elections are due. That is when they cross the island announcing the fantastic things they will achieve when they are re-elected, things that they never thought of during the previous nine years when they could have done them.

CUT RIBBONS

Of course they make these announcements as they cut ribbons for projects not yet complete. The toll road from May Pen to Williamsfield was declared open on September 14, 2023 but is still not a toll road. The incomplete highway from Harbour View to Yallahs was declared open on February 6, 2024, just days before the local government elections; they are still – as you read this – working to complete it before the elections are called. I don’t think they will make it. The government’s record in building this over-time over-budget highway is very poor! If the local was a general, the ruling party would have lost East Rural St Andrew through which the road passes.

And then with trumpets blowing and flags waving they declared open the incomplete “Morant Bay Urban Centre” earlier this month. It looks more like a shopping plaza to me, but none of the stores are yet ready to open. As a rural development scientist (I did the fieldwork for my MPhil thesis in St Thomas) I am interested in the strategy that says that the way to develop rural areas is to build plazas with KFC. The only people who can afford foreign fast food are those already prosperous. The only people likely to get prosperous because of that Urban Centre will be the shopkeepers, almost all of whom – I understand – are from outside St Thomas.

What sort of people will be impressed by ribbon-cutting at an incomplete shopping plaza or highway development just before an election? Aren’t they smart enough to see though it? Or is it that the ruling party is contemptuous of the intelligence of “we, the (Jamaican) people”?

Who has not seen through the naked attempt at a power-grab passing for a constitutional reform process? Those of us who love this country were deeply offended that we were not consulted about the type of constitution we want for Jamaica. And worse offended when the government claimed to have consulted us when they held what they called “town hall meetings” where they told us what they were going to do! After several such meetings, not one recommendation made was incorporated into the draft bill. Not a word was changed.

Frankly, this kind of autocratic behaviour scares me!

With our present Westminster-style constitution the prime minister is already sovereign, with monarchical powers. The only checks on his absolute power are the courts, and the requirement for two-thirds majority in the senate to pass certain constitutional amendments.

CONTROL VOTES

You will recall the attempt to control the votes of senators by requiring them to sign undated letters of resignation. The PM by himself already appoints the chief justice, which I consider to be highly undesirable; but we must remember the attempt by the PM to make the chief justice toe the line by giving him a temporary appointment, with confirmation coming only if he behaves himself.

I am concerned that section 14 of the draft of the new constitution makes it easy for Jamaica’s president appointed by the PM to remove a sitting judge. I hope this is not an attempt to control the judiciary.

This is scary behaviour! Alarm bells are going off: DANGER! DANGER!

An insightful electorate will not be distracted by the positive titbits of its record that the government will dangle before the public. If government policy is dangerous to our democracy, then they must be sent into opposition.

I have written before that the proposal by this government to amend the Education Act and its Code of Regulations will concentrate more power in the hands of the minister of education, and diminish the control the Church has over the schools it owns and operates.

This is dangerous policy, and the churches must advise its members to show the door to any government trying to take over its schools.

A government wishing to “run on its record” cannot pick and choose which part of its record the electorate must look at. Some governments simply must be voted out for dangerous, dictatorial and undemocratic policies.

Peter Espeut is a sociologist and development scientist. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com