KINGSTON, Jamaica— Prime Minister Andrew Holness is appealing to Jamaicans not to use the island’s road network as a political football.

His appeal, at the governing Jamaica Labour Party’s 79th annual conference at the National Arena on Sunday, comes against the background of widespread demonstrations against the poor state of the country’s roads.

Holness suggested some of the protest action was politically motivated and argued that the problem spanned political administrations. He pointed out that in the First Supplementary Estimates that was tabled in the Parliament earlier this month, the government allocated close to $4 billion to deal with “urgent and emergency repairs of roads”.

The prime minister acknowledged that the amount was not enough and said “we hear the cries of the people in the rural communities who feel that their roadways have been neglected”.

Holness noted that Jamaica has more roads per square mile than most countries and said “everyone expects that their road must be asphalted to a certain a condition”.

Yet, he highlighted that no more than 10 per cent of the road network has been sufficiently maintained to allow it stand up to the volume of traffic that it currently takes. He said some roads have seen very little intervention outside of some patching, in 50 years.

To underscore his point that the issue of roads should not be politicised, Holness referenced a 1994 Budget presentation from then Prime Minister P.J. Patterson and said “he was making the same point about roads”.

“This is not a problem that emerged overnight but people want to take it and turn it into a political problem. Don’t turn our roadways into a political football,” he remarked.

The prime minister said his administration will make the necessary allocations in the current budget and in the budget to come to make repairs and improvements to local and secondary roads “as far as we can”.