The People’s National Party is gravely concerned by the Holness administration’s slow, reactive and inequitable handling of the drought now gripping Jamaica. This is not an unforeseeable act of nature; it is the predictable result of underinvestment and neglect in the water sector, matters the Opposition has raised repeatedly over the past decade, including recently in Hayles’ contribution to the 2026 Sectoral Debate.

The Hermitage Dam now stands at just 31.4 per cent of capacity, and the Meteorological Service warns Jamaica is on course to surpass the historic 2022 drought. Prohibition orders remain in force across seven parishes, even as the Minister concedes that traditional rainfall patterns can no longer be relied upon. Yet his Ministry continues to manage this crisis one press conference at a time, rather than through a comprehensive national water security plan for Jamaica.

This drought has simply exposed structural failures long warned about:

• Non-Revenue Water remains a national scandal: of every four million gallons the National Water Commission (NWC) produces, roughly three million are lost or unbilled, even as households are told there is no water to give them.
• More than 1,000 water systems across Jamaica remain independent and unlinked, so while some parishes run dry, water elsewhere goes untapped, because government has failed to invest in the transmission linkages needed to move supply to where demand is.
• Planning has not been strategic and modern technology is missing. There are opportunities, for example, to properly assess and treat natural sources such as water wells for potable use. Where this has not been done, viable groundwater supply remains undeveloped as a source of relief.

The Government shelved the Rapid Response Unit, the very emergency programme built to truck affordable water to communities in crisis, leaving a gap that private hauliers have rushed to fill. Jamaicans in hard-hit communities now report paying as much as $50,000 for a single truckload of water, a cost directly traceable to the loss of that affordable public capacity.

Add to this an energy-efficiency portfolio with only one completed project, despite the NWC spending roughly a billion dollars a month to pump water, and capital budgets under-executed year after year according to the Auditor General and the Independent Fiscal Commission, and a clear picture emerges: this crisis has been steadily escalating for a decade.

The Government’s own figures confirm the scale of the scramble now underway. An $86-million emergency allocation has already been spent, with officials projecting the total bill could reach half a billion dollars. By the Minister’s own admission, as many as 1,000 schools need water tanks just to open safely in September, only days away. These assessments should have been made and acted on months ago, not days before the bell rings.

The Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ) has now warned this drought is becoming an economic risk, not merely a household inconvenience, threatening business continuity and, ultimately, job security, as some businesses may be forced to close without water.

The Opposition is calling on the Government to move beyond crisis management and act decisively:

1. Immediately allocate water tanks to hard-hit constituencies in a quantity that reflects the need.
2. Provide immediate funding to every Member of Parliament in drought-impacted areas, Government and Opposition alike, for trucking water. No Jamaican should be left behind because of who represents them.
3. Publish the full planned spend for the drought response, so the country can be confident that the plans in place are driven by data and need.
4. Present clear timelines for water infrastructure projects now underway, so Jamaica is not standing in this same place, begging for relief, in 2027.

Jamaicans in every parish are living with lock-offs, trucking delays and daily uncertainty about water security. Press conferences and reassuring words will not fix a broken system; only real investment, planning and timely execution of projects will. The Opposition stands ready to constructively support short- and medium-term solutions in the best interest of the Jamaican people.