BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – NEWS reaching SKNVibes this morning (Feb. 26) states that the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) was declared winner of that island’s General Election which was held yesterday.
According to the Jamaica Observer, the JLP won 33 of the 63 constituency seats while the People’s National Party (PNP) laid claim to the other 30 seats.
The JLP will now form Jamaica’s new Government with the party’s leader, Andrew Holness, as Prime Minister.
“The December 2011 election, which resulted in the JLP being voted out of office after just one term, saw a 53 per cent turnout of electors, in which the PNP shocked the nation by capturing 42 of the 63 parliamentary seats. The remainder went to the JLP,” the Jamaica Observer reported.
The media house also stated that yesterday’s general election was the 17th since Universal Adult Suffrage in which Jamaicans won the right to vote in 1944 at a time when the country was still under colonial rule, adding that the JLP has now won eight elections to the PNP’s nine.
According to CBCnews, the victorious Holness was greeted by cheering supporters when he arrived at party headquarters in the capital following the announcement of the results in a hard-fought fight with the PNP of outgoing Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller.
CBCnews noted that Holness has pledged to create jobs and grow the economy while improving education and health care.
“We don’t take it that we have won a prize,” he told the crowd. “The cost of victory is to keep the commitments we have made.”
The outgoing Prime Minister, Simpson-Miller became Jamaica’s first female leader in 2006, but her term was short-lived; it ended in the following year. She however regained that position following her party’s victory in the 2011 general election.
According to CBCnews, her return as Prime Minister was “amid a shrinking economy and one of the highest levels of debt relative to GDP in the world. Her government negotiated a $930 million aid package with the IMF”.
The news outlet reported that during Simpson-Miller’s tenure “the Jamaican dollar has declined, the cost of living has gone up and wages have been stagnant. The IMF, however, has praised the government for cutting debt and making other reforms to its economy and the country’s stock market was rated among the best performing in the world last year”.
In its report leading up to the outcome of the election, CBCnews pointed to a comment made by a voter named Herbert Hall: “It makes no sense we stop the progress now. We've made a lot of progress with the economy and development. It would be chaos if we change now.”
But Holness’ campaign, it stated, pledge to make the economy more dynamic with cuts to the income tax and other measures resonate with many in a country with widespread poverty and a youth unemployment rate above 30 per cent.
The media house also reported that many Jamaicans are fed up with one of the highest homicide rates in the world, mostly blamed on gangs. The country had at least 1,192 slayings in 2015, a roughly 20 percent increase from the previous year. By comparison, Chicago, which has roughly the same population as Jamaica at 2.7 million, had 468 killings in the same period.
Notably, for a country with a population of over 2.5 million people, Jamaica, unlike some countries in the Caribbean region, had announced the election results long before mid-night.
