Grading Holness and his Cabinet

COME November, the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) will no doubt be having its annual conference, which should be a grand and upbeat affair coming in the wake of its historic thirdterm victory a year ago. In this vein, it is perhaps more than appropriate to assess the party’s first year in this new Administration which has been overshadowed and challenged by the marauding winds of Hurricane Melissa. Interestingly, Prime Minister Dr Holness has been honest in admitting that not everything has gone well so far.

Indeed, notwithstanding an extensive and sometimes overbearing public relations campaign touting resilience and performance, the recovery process has had many foul-ups, bleeps, and blunders. In this context, what has transpired in the education system up to this point should cause the Administration to barely scrape through with a passing grade. In the meantime, the recovery efforts in western Jamaica have again fallen short of being spectacular.

So now the nation waits with bated breath to see what the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority (NaRRA) can do to remove the egg from Dr Holness’s face. Be that as it may, this writer would like to present a scorecard on the overall performance of the prime minister and his 19-member Cabinet. Dr Holness, the first among equals, is minister of defence and minister of economic growth and infrastructure development, the latter a humongous and wide-ranging portfolio that concentrates tremendous power and spheres of influence in his hands.

To list the many agencies and government bodies currently under his wing would be tiresome. Suffice it to say, he is monarch of all he surveys! Already, he himself has admitted that there are some serious headwinds moving in on the economy, including slow growth and an insidious inflationary cycle (my words) that in the long run may force the Government to raise taxes, tighten wage restraints, and go hat in hand to the lending conglomerates.

To put it bluntly, the good ship Jamaica is being tossed about in choppy waters primarily because of the geopolitical storms affecting the world at large, thanks in much part…