Getting Its House in Order: Jamaica Rewards Leader With Rare Third Term 

Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness recently proposed an extraordinary measure for his fellow lawmakers: job descriptions. 

“If this House is to be part of the engine of growth, then its members must operate with the highest standards of efficiency and productivity and integrity and accountability,” he said, according to Caribbean National Weekly. 

The move illustrated his campaign pledge to address corruption, crime, and economic inequity, which helped him and his Jamaica Labour Party win a rare third term in office earlier this month. It’s been one of many popular moves that he has made. 

Holness has already reduced killings on the island by 43 percent so far this year through firearm seizures and police crackdowns, reported the Associated Press. Homicides are now at their lowest in 25 years. American Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently praised him for working with the US on fighting transnational crime. Still, human rights activists have raised questions about these efforts, noted the Christian Science Monitor. 

Much of the crime in Jamaica had been caused by so-called “posses,” or gangs, with links to political parties, including the Labour Party and the opposition People’s National Party, explained Lancaster University international politics professor Amalendu Misra in the Conversation. Holness appears to have ended that practice. Instead, he’s invested in anti-gang programs and tackling urban poverty. 

Unemployment on the island stands at a low rate of 3.3 percent. Even so, many Jamaicans still feel as if they aren’t enjoying the fruits of their tourist-dependent economy. The prime minister has also pledged to double the minimum wage to $200 per 40-hour workweek, added the BBC. He aims to reduce the country’s income tax from 25 percent to 15 percent in a bid to boost consumption, too.  

Those policies are possible in part due to his fiscal discipline. Since assuming office in 2016, the prime minister has shrunk public debt to less than 74 percent of gross domestic product last year from 140 percent in 2013. 

Skeptics question whether Holness is as true and pure as his record might suggest, however. Many Jamaicans wonder whether the prime minister has accumulated ill-gotten assets, even as he has portrayed himself as a good-government reformer, despite the absence of evidence for these suspicions, wrote the Jamaica Observer. 

Critics also say his proposal to end Jamaica’s reliance on the Privy Council – a relic of the British empire – as a final court of appeal in favor of a regional Caribbean Court of Justice struck the Jamaican Gleaner as a potential move to undercut justice rather than enforce it, for example. 

But his supporters don’t care.  

What they are seeing, analysts say, is a decline in crime, a country getting its house in order fiscally, and a push to help them with bread-and-butter issues such as jobs, wages, and taxes.  

It’s no small thing that the country has accomplished, said Kevin O’Brien Chang, a Jamaican columnist and political commentator. He told Bloomberg that crippling debt, high unemployment, and high crime seemed like immutable parts of the national experience – until now: “If you had told me 10 years ago” that Jamaica could resolve some of those problems, “I would have said it was pure fantasy.”