Caribbean & Central America - April 2006 (ISSN 1741-4458)

Portia Simpson Miller was sworn in as prime minister on 30 March. Her first move was to plump for continuity in her new government. She retained much of the cabinet she inherited from PJ Patterson, including two of the leadership contenders against whom she competed in February: Peter Phillips, the national security minister, and Omar Davies, the finance and planning minister.

The retention of Phillips, Simpson Miller's closest rival in a highly charged People's National Party leadership contest, was the most eye-catching appointment. Phillips will have the task of tackling the intractable issue of violent crime. Murders rose in 2005 to a record 1,671 - equivalent to 64 per 100,000 inhabitants - by far the highest rate in Latin America and the Caribbean. Phillips's anti-crime initiative Operation Kingfish has met with some success however, receiving plaudits from the US State Department in its International Narcotic Control Strategy Report (see RC-06-03), and the murder rate has been falling in the first two months of this year to a projected 50 per 100,000.

Big budget

Davies was kept on for expediency if nothing else. Within two weeks of Simpson Miller taking office, Davies had to present his budget speech. On 12 April he tabled a J$358bn (US$5.47bn) budget, bigger than last year's revised estimates by 3.5%. The shadow finance minister, Audley Shaw, dismissed the budget as unrealistic and suggested that it was an election budget. Far from being extravagant, however, the budget is fairly restrained. Given that inflation was approximately 11% for the last fiscal year, there is actually a real decrease in expenditure. 

Although any budget is constrained by the need to service Jamaica's nearly J$1tr debt, Davies increased education funding, especially for the Education Transformation Project (ETP), and funding for health and agriculture and housing, transport and works to cover infrastructural works in Kingston and St Andrew in preparation for the Cricket World Cup in 2007.

If Shaw is right and Simpson Miller really is intent on calling general elections soon to capitalise on the wave of support she has received since becoming Jamaica's first female PM she will need Phillips to contain violent crime and Davies to begin to solve the problem of unemployment which fluctuated around 12% in 2005.