THE People’s National Party (PNP) yesterday rubbished a list of achievements claimed by the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) over the past four years, stating that the ruling party simply inherited and continued most of the programmes laid down by the PNP during its years in office.

The PNP also sought to dismiss the view that its proposed Jamaica Emergency Employment Programme (JEEP) was the Jamaica Infrastructure Development Programme (JDIP) under a different name. It said that JEEP would be more transparent, environmentally beneficial and would create more jobs at the community level.

“We note that having been criticised by the JLP for our years in office, that party has now seen it opportune to lay claim to many of the things the PNP accomplished, as being achievements of their own,” PNP campaign spokesman Delano Franklyn told journalists yesterday.

He dismissed as “unvarnished untruth” many of the claims stated by the JLP leadership in a presentation last Thursday highlighting its achievements since it took office in 2007.

The current growth in tourism has resulted mainly from several large Spanish hotels built under the PNP regime, while projects such as Montego Bay Convention Centre, the Falmouth Pier and Washington Boulevard improvement were started by the PNP, Franklyn said.

“The Jamaica Labour Party cannot show one large investment in the area of tourism during the period that they have been in office,” he said at a press conference at the PNP’s headquarters.

Franklyn, supported by party chairman Robert Pickersgill, spokesman on justice Mark Golding and deputy general secretary Julian Robinson, said the JLP’s claim of achieving single digit inflation was not true, noting that there has been double digit inflation in three of its four years in office.

Other “blatant falsehoods and misrepresentations” the PNP said were the halting the scrap metal trade to save the loss of millions of dollars in infrastructure, when the Contractor General identified 97 illegal shipments of scrap metal; and that the abolition of cost sharing in secondary schools has helped all children to attend school, when parents are burdened with higher auxiliary fees and other costs.

Franklyn said while the PNP has no problem with continuing programmes over administrations, the JLP should be honest about its contribution.

“The uninitiated person out there would be of the impression that they built these things from scratch and delivered them in the four years,” he said. “What we have is a government of lies, a government of deceit and a government that would wish to posit in the minds of people things they have not done.”

Explaining the differences between JEEP and JDIP, Golding said JEEP unlike JDIP would be brought back onto the national budget, and 25 per cent of the funding would be reconfigured to have greater impact of employment by focusing labour-intensive work such as gully repair, river training, and reforestation which would impact on the environment.

Golding said the remaining 75 per cent of JDIP funds would still be spent on road repair and maintenance but would be done to provide “better value for money and the choice of the projects will be done in a transparent way rather than the politically victimizing way that it is being done so far”.