Jamaica’s Opposition Chief Mark Golding has unveiled the Folks’s Nationwide Get together’s (PNP) 2025 manifesto, describing it as a blueprint to construct a stronger Jamaica. The launch of the doc, titled Mission Jamaica Love, A Folks’s Pledge to Nation, passed off final night time at The Jamaica Pegasus lodge in New Kingston.
Talking to a packed viewers, Golding mentioned the manifesto rests on 10 pillars aimed toward fostering inclusive improvement. He acknowledged Jamaica’s macroeconomic progress since 2013 however emphasised that many voters proceed to wrestle.
“Wages can not stretch; costs are rising every day; primary public providers are substandard; younger folks have too few alternatives; and communities throughout the nation are trapped in poverty, crime, and neglect,” he mentioned. “Stability within the public funds with out high quality of life for folks isn’t prosperity and is why Jamaicans are clamouring for change.”
Golding highlighted the PNP’s earlier contributions to nationwide improvement, together with fiscal reforms and social programmes akin to PATH, the Nationwide Well being Fund, and JADEP for seniors. “We perceive each the progress and the ache as a result of we’ve got walked this street with you. We have been the architects of Jamaica’s celebrated macroeconomic reforms, from the important thing parts of the Fiscal Accountability Framework to the modernisation of the income system, bringing the nation’s debt underneath management and permitting a regime of inflation focusing on to be launched,” he mentioned.
The opposition chief additionally cited infrastructural achievements, together with the Nationwide Housing Belief, Jamaican City Transit Firm, main highways, expanded seaports and airports, fashionable telecommunications, and renewable vitality tasks such because the Wigton Wind Farm. But, he careworn, the advantages of improvement haven’t reached all communities.
“City blight and decay plague our cities whereas rural Jamaica has been left behind. Farm roads are impassable, irrigation is insufficient and outdated, and farmers lack the instruments, equipment, and assist methods to provide and prosper,” Golding mentioned.
The manifesto outlines 10 pillars: justice for all, entry to high quality schooling, fashionable infrastructure, agriculture and meals safety, innovation and trade, take care of the weak, accountability in governance, land and housing, alternative for youth, violence prevention, and environmental resilience. “They’ll information us to spend money on folks, shut the gaps between uptown and downtown, between tourism zones and rural parishes, between the well-connected few who thrive whereas the bulk really feel uncared for and dejected,” Golding mentioned.
He promised {that a} future PNP authorities would safeguard financial stability whereas fostering inclusive progress and tackling corruption. “Jamaica, time come to raise our nation larger and construct a future that belongs to all of us. Allow us to take this journey collectively,” he mentioned.
Golding additionally reaffirmed plans to revive the Workplace of the Political Ombudsman as an unbiased physique, strengthen the Integrity Fee, enhance parliamentary oversight, and reform the Entry to Info Act for faster and broader public entry. Different initiatives embrace modernizing licensing frameworks, rising the financial jurisdiction of parish courts, and launching a public dialogue on the Nationwide Intercourse Offender Registry.
Three key items of laws handed underneath former Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller—the Native Governance Act, Native Authorities Financing and Monetary Administration Act, and Native Authorities Unified Service and Employment Act—will probably be reviewed, Golding mentioned, with a concentrate on full enforcement and group empowerment.
“We’ll shift focus from constituency politics to group improvement by increasing the powers of our municipal firms to make a distinction in native folks’s lives. And we’ll set up a Nationwide Folks’s Meeting, together with Diaspora representatives, to evaluation legal guidelines and form coverage impacting native communities. We’ll introduce participatory budgeting and native planning, the place residents assist to resolve the spending priorities, which is contemplated by the three strategic legal guidelines,” he mentioned.
Golding concluded: “Jamaica is demanding broader inclusion, alongside better accountability and integrity in public affairs. And the Folks’s Nationwide Get together, underneath my management, will ship on that broad name.”
