Ross Sheil, Staff Reporter
BENNETT
HYACINTH BENNETT, former president of the National Democratic Movement (NDM), yesterday challenged Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) members to unseat the governing People's National Party (PNP).
Mrs. Bennet was the guest speaker at the party's Area Council One monthly meeting at the Undergrad School, on Dunrobin Avenue, St. Andrew yesterday.
She told her audience that the JLP would need greater unity to form a government. She said: "That unity may very well include the old ones, with the new ones, with the blue ones."
This, some interpret as a possible hint that the head the Hydel Group of Schools may be joining the JLP.
However, when asked by The Gleaner as to a possible switch, she replied "No" as she remained a "non-active" member of the NDM.
Mrs. Bennett, who was introduced as the first female leader of a Jamaican political party by Mayor of Kingston and chairman of Area Council One, Desmond McKenzie, said that to persuade voters, the JLP would have to appear more unified and lose its image as a party that airs its dirty laundry in public.
"You have to lose the tendency for cass-cass, you have to lose the tendency to be selfish," she said.
"They have been waiting for almost two decades for a real change from their lives of misery, frustration, hopelessness and abject poverty," she said of voters.
In what seem a veiled reference to Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller, she dismissed the "vote-catching ploy" of invoking religion in politics.
She complimented Opposition Leader Bruce Golding, who she succeeded at the helm of NDM before his rejoining the JLP, as someone who understood the problems and the solutions.
Then to much applause, Mrs. Bennett launched her rendition of Baby Cham's 'Ghetto Story', the same popular song that Minister Industry Science and Technology Phillip Paulwell performed while campaigning for Mrs. Simpson Miller's successful bid for the People's National Party (PNP) presidency in February. This time song a 'JLP survival story'.
