Shame on you AGAIN, Holness

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The Caribbean Is One Nation.                                Shame on you AGAIN, Holness
Andrew Holness

“We are not serious about investment, things not going so well in CARICOM, our citizen are being treated with disrespect and yet we want to intensify our ties with CARICOM. I say no to that.”
(Jamaica opposition leader Andrew Holness addressing the recent annual general conference of his Jamaica Labour Party)
The mahogany Coconut Group is not surprised that Holness is at it again, trying to bury CARICOM and engender nothing but negativity toward regional unity by attempting to whip the Jamaican populace in to anti- CARICOM frenzy. He sees this dastardly act as his path to Prime Minister.  Once again we are forced to cry shame on you Holness.
It was back in January(1/25/14), when we highlighted Mr. Holness’ opposition, to the Caribbean Court of Justice CCJ replacing the Privy Council as the court of last resort for our region. At that time, we had hoped that he would have changed his position but far from so doing, his assault on CARCOM and by extension regional unity has intensified.
We have warned time and time again that the region is producing visionless leaders. We have further warned that many of them are products of the University of the West Indies and we therefore, once more, must ask: What kind of leadership studies is offered by UWI. How can leaders educated in England, in the harshest periods of racism and other debilitating experiences be more visionary than those schooled in the region?
Holness seems to be now evolving as the most backward thinking leader in the region. His stance is approaching an embarrassment and the sooner he is removed from leadership of the JLP the better for Jamaica and the entire region.

Below we reprint our first article about Holness opposition to The CCJ, so that readers can judge Mr. Holness’ positions more clearly:

                                                Shame on you Holness

Andrew Holness
The news out of Jamaica is that the Opposition Jamaica Labour Party JLP wants to have a referendum, to determine if Jamaica should be a part of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CJJ). Once more the noose is being drawn tighter around the already choking neck of the regional integration movement.
We would have thought that Mr. Andrew Holness, the young, dynamic and recently reelected leader of the Jamaica Labour Party, would have been more in tuned with progressive thinkers in the region. If the new breed of Caribbean leaders, of which we include Mr. Holness, cannot be more enlightened, it means that crapaud lining up to smoke we pipe!
Others may opine, that to expect him to be any different, is an excursion in futility since he is the political godson of former prime minister Mr. Edward Seaga, who was known to only make decisions that enhanced his political ambitions and whose legacy will be the nefarious garrison politics that he used so well to extend a rather useless political career.
Perhaps we were really too optimistic in holding Mr. Holiness to a higher standard because we were not paying enough attention as to why he was so soundly beaten, in the last elections, by the Peoples National Party, led by the current Prime Minister , Portia Simpson- Miller. We can now understand why there are some within his own party, who do not repose much confidence in him as their leader and recently mounted an unsuccessful effort to remove him from the leadership of the JLP.
We urge Mr. Holness and the JLP to find better things to do with their time in opposition, such as creating policies to end the grip that the IMF still has on our Jamaican brothers and sisters. We are certain that rather than trying to put another spoke in the CARICOM wheel, he should come up with positions that can carry Caribbean unity further along the path to creating the New Caribbean Nation.
In the meantime, we have no choice other than to closely monitor Mr. Holness and hope that this anti-unity stance is a passing cloud. However, he can rest assured that if he continues down this path, we would have no choice other than to expedite him and his present backward thinking into the political wilderness. We can only say shame on you Mr. Holness and shame on the Jamaica Labour party!

 1/25/14



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