分类： politics

As Jamaica grapples with a persistent, debilitating shortage of skilled tradespeople to fuel its growing construction and infrastructure pipeline, a prominent high school principal has launched a scathing rebuke of the government’s mismanagement of the country’s flagship vocational training agency, the HEART/NSTA Trust, describing the well-funded institution as a “fat calf” that delivers little tangible value for the nation.

Linvern Wright, principal of William Knibb Memorial High School and immediate former president of the Jamaica Association of Principals of Secondary Schools, made the criticisms during an address at the Jamaica Teachers’ Association’s *Go Public! Fund Education* national forum on Monday. His remarks came just days after Government Senator Kavan Gayle sounded the alarm in the upper chamber of parliament about the acute skilled labor crisis gripping Jamaica’s construction sector.

Gayle told senators during debate on the 2026 National Housing Trust (Amendment) (Special Provisions) Act that the industry is currently facing devastating shortfalls of qualified workers across every key trade, including carpenters, masons, steel workers, electricians, plumbers, and construction finishers. He outlined multiple overlapping drivers of the crisis: large-scale emigration of skilled tradespeople seeking higher wages overseas, a rapidly ageing domestic workforce, chronically low graduation rates from the country’s vocational training programs, and intensifying competition for limited labor from the wave of major infrastructure projects now underway across the island. The shortage, Gayle confirmed, is already triggering costly project delays, persistent staffing gaps, and widespread productivity dips across the construction sector, which is central to meeting Jamaica’s growing demand for new housing, public infrastructure, and post-disaster school reconstruction.

Against this urgent backdrop, Wright says the labor gap forces uncomfortable questions about the decades of public investment poured into HEART/NSTA Trust, the country’s primary provider of technical and vocational education and training. He argues that the institution has failed to deliver a return on that investment, noting that no other segment of Jamaica’s education system—from early childhood learning to tertiary education—has received the same level of cumulative funding that HEART has secured over the years.

“No other sector of education — tertiary, primary, early childhood — none of them has got the amount of funding that HEART has got, and what we have is a really fat calf that is not producing much for the country, so we have got to look at how we deal with these kinds of things in terms of how we fund things,” Wright told the forum.

Wright recalled that Jamaica’s technical and vocational education ecosystem once thrived thanks to robust, sustained partnerships between secondary schools and private industry, a model that produced strong outcomes through the 1970s and 1980s. Major private companies such as Alcan invested directly in vocational programs at prominent secondary schools including STETHS and Holmwood Technical High School, but Wright says that level of private sector engagement and strategic investment has long since disappeared, leaving once-strong programs rusted and outdated.

Beyond the specific failures of HEART/NSTA Trust, Wright framed the skilled labor crisis as a symptom of a deeper, long-standing structural failure: successive Jamaican governments have consistently refused to treat education as a top national priority, denying it the level of focused attention and sustained financial commitment granted to other high-priority policy initiatives.

To illustrate this disparity, he pointed to the extensive, high-profile parliamentary deliberations that preceded the passage of legislation establishing the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority (NaRRA). “I want all of you to think of how long our Government spent to discuss the NaRRA Bill. They never slept because that was important to them. It was priority. I have never in my life as an educator seen them spend past maybe two hours talking about education. NaRRA was priority, with all its ills and all its issues. It was priority,” Wright said.

Wright argued that until legislative leaders commit to extended, focused debate and put in place binding commitments to education funding, the sector will continue to lack the resources it needs to meet national needs. To insulate long-term education investment from shifting political priorities and fluctuating economic conditions, he called for the introduction of legislation that enshrines a legally protected minimum level of public investment in education, guaranteeing sustained funding regardless of changes in government direction.

A sharp political dispute has erupted in Jamaica over national water infrastructure energy resilience, after the opposition’s water spokesperson accused the ruling government of failing to adopt solar power to protect the National Water Commission (NWC) from widespread outages caused by Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS) grid failures.

Ian Hayles, the opposition’s shadow minister for water, made his claims in a public statement released Sunday, days after a full JPS grid shutdown left much of the country without power. Hayles argued that the NWC’s heavy dependence on JPS for powering its water distribution networks creates a dangerous public vulnerability, framing the government’s inaction on a transition to solar and advanced renewables for critical NWC infrastructure as more than an oversight — it is a full-blown governance crisis that endangers public health, the critical tourism sector, and daily life for Jamaicans across densely populated communities nationwide. He called for the immediate rollout of a policy shifting critical NWC infrastructure to renewable energy, and demanded the government table a full, sector-wide energy resilience plan in the current parliamentary session.

But Matthew Samuda, Jamaica’s incumbent Minister of Water, has pushed back hard against Hayles’ accusations, dismissing the claim as either deliberately misleading or born of willful ignorance. In an exclusive interview with Jamaica Observer on Monday, Samuda detailed the multiple ongoing and completed initiatives the government has already launched to boost NWC’s resilience to power disruptions, noting that the administration has already invested billions in upgrading the water network’s energy infrastructure since 2024.

Following the passage of Hurricane Beryl, which caused widespread damage across south-western Jamaica in 2024, the government installed 31 large-scale backup generators at key NWC facilities across the country, as part of a program targeting 110 critical water systems that serve more than 70 percent of the NWC’s total customer base. To date, Samuda confirmed, $1 billion Jamaican dollars have already been allocated and spent on this generator initiative.

Beyond backup generation, Samuda added, the government is already midway through an $850 million energy upgrade project for the NWC, a plan he first outlined publicly during his sectoral parliamentary address in April. He pointed out that Hayles, who represents the Westmoreland Western constituency, should already be aware of the ongoing upgrades, as work is actively taking place within his own electoral district. Samuda specifically referenced the Logwood water facility that supplies the major tourism hub of Negril, where the government installed a new backup generator after the original unit was destroyed by vandalism following Hurricane Melissa in October 2025, and has already purchased a replacement generator to restore full resilience to the site.

Addressing Hayles’ core claim that expanded solar adoption would have prevented the widespread water outages during the recent island-wide JPS blackout, Samuda pushed back on the feasibility of a full transition to renewables for the entire NWC network. He explained that strict constraints on available land and the steep upfront capital costs of large-scale solar infrastructure make a complete shift away from JPS impractical for all pumping systems. Samuda noted that the NWC’s monthly energy bill to JPS already hovers around $1 billion, depending on global fuel prices, and any full shift to off-grid renewables would only pass those massive costs onto Jamaican consumers, rather than eliminating them. That said, he acknowledged the government’s ongoing commitment to driving down energy costs for the NWC.

Samuda clarified that the government is already implementing solar solutions at multiple NWC facilities, alongside other efficiency upgrades: the agency is retrofitting its oldest, least efficient pumps to cut energy use, rewiring aging facilities to reduce on-site energy loss, and powering NWC administrative offices with solar to lower operating costs and extend operational hours during outages. He also revealed that work is already underway to convert the Mona Reservoir in St. Andrew into a utility-scale renewable energy facility, with a private investor already committed to the project and more than US$60 million allocated for development.

In addition to outlining the government’s progress, Samuda challenged Hayles, who served as State Minister for Water in the previous People’s National Party (PNP) administration between 2012 and 2016, to disclose what energy resilience investments the opposition completed during its time in office. Samuda argued that there is no public record of any significant generator purchases or solar panel installations by the PNP government during Hayles’ tenure, even as solar technology became widely adopted across Jamaica starting in 2009. He added that unrealistic calls for an immediate full transition ignore the country’s current fiscal constraints, noting that the government is committed to annual incremental investments until full energy resilience for the NWC is achieved, and there are no unexplained delays in the ongoing rollout. Samuda concluded that Hayles’ criticisms are nothing more than opportunistic political point-scoring that ignores the actual progress already being delivered.

KINGSTON, Jamaica — A simmering political row over Jamaica’s cruise shipping performance has erupted this week, as a first-term opposition parliamentarian has publicly called out the country’s top tourism official for failing to reverse a steep, years-long decline in cruise passenger volumes even as the global industry booms post-pandemic.

Andrea Purkiss, the opposition’s spokesperson on tourism and linkages and Member of Parliament for Hanover Eastern, delivered the sharp critique during her maiden speech to the House of Representatives during the ongoing Sectoral Debate on Tuesday. Purkiss accuses Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett of staying “completely silent” on the sector’s struggles, which have seen Jamaica’s cruise passenger numbers drop by more than 28% since 2019, ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Purkiss pushed back against Bartlett’s previous claims that the local cruise sector has “lived up to expectations,” arguing that the only expectation the minister has met is that no one would verify his inaccurate public statements. She laid out detailed statistics to back up her critique: in 2019, Jamaica hosted 1,544,233 cruise passengers. By the end of 2025, that number fell to just 1,106,361, marking a 28.4% seven-year decline that equals a loss of nearly 438,000 potential visitors annually.

These missing visitors do not just translate to lower port activity, Purkiss explained. They represent lost income across Jamaica’s entire tourism ecosystem, from local taxi drivers and craft vendors to owners of tourist attractions across the island. The opposition spokesperson calculated that the Jamaican government’s failure to recapture lost cruise market share has cost the sector more than 3 million missed passenger visits, amounting to an estimated $30 million U.S. dollars (equal to 4.5 billion Jamaican dollars) in lost economic activity, based on a conservative estimate of $10 U.S. in spending per cruise passenger.

Purkiss emphasized that her critique is not an unfair political attack, noting that the global cruise industry has already fully rebounded from the pandemic — and is in fact seeing record growth. Global cruise passenger volume has surged to an all-time high of 37.2 million, a 25.2% jump compared to 2019 pre-pandemic levels. The Caribbean region is leading this expansion, capturing 44% of all global cruise traffic, and many of Jamaica’s regional neighbors have capitalized on the boom to grow their own cruise sectors, Purkiss pointed out.

She cited concrete examples of regional success to contrast with Jamaica’s performance: Antigua and Barbuda has grown its cruise sector by 9.9% after opening a new purpose-built terminal; Barbados is reporting all-time record cruise visitor numbers; Mexico’s Cozumel now welcomes 4.73 million cruise passengers annually; and the Bahamas has seen its cruise traffic double since 2019.

The exchange highlights growing political friction over Jamaica’s tourism strategy, a core driver of the country’s national economy, as the opposition pushes the government to address why the nation has failed to capitalize on a global cruise boom that has benefited its closest competitors.