03 April 2005

The Long Good-Bye

Common Sense
John Maxwell

I got myself into a great deal of hot water 40 years ago when I wrote an editorial entitled "Who will tell the Old Man to Go?" Jamaica's first officially styled prime minister, Sir Alexander Bustamante, was, unfortunately, in his dotage when he became prime minister after the elections of 1962.

He could still crack the odd joke, but it was clear to anyone who knew him and to many who didn't, that he was past his prime. But then it was considered sacrilege to criticise the PM.

I was accused of being rude, offensive and a host of other unkind things. There was even a parliamentary debate about the paper I edited - Public Opinion - and about me. Neither The Gleaner nor the Press Association could see any reasonable objection to the Government's shutting me up by shutting us down, nor could the Inter-American Press Association, that bastion of 'Press Freedom'.

I recount this just to suggest my evenhandedness in these matters - in further consideration of which I submit the fact that I watched my paper being torn to bits by Norman Manley in front of a PNP NEC meeting in Mandeville and by the Hon Edwin Allen, minister of education, in Parliament a few weeks later. Great fun.

It was easy to criticise Bustamante, now a national hero, because most people knew that he was just along for the ride and that the real prime minister was Donald Sangster. Bustamante derided Norman Manley's refurbishing of Vale Royal as the Prime Ministerial residence; it was much more suitable, he said, for a maternity home.

So, at great expense he built Jamaica House, but refused to live there; just before he was due to occupy it, the place was struck by lightning, and a week or so later, when he was at the Caymanas Park races, the grandstand there was also struck by lightning. It was a 'Sign', some said.

Since Bustamante's retirement, only two prime ministers have spent any time in Jamaica House - Hugh Shearer and Michael Manley. I am not sure how long Shearer remained there, but Manley couldn't stand the place and moved to a (much smaller) protocol house. Sangster lived at Vale Royal, as did Seaga and Patterson. It seems that Norman Manley had the right idea all along.

Norman Manley's more important ideas have stood up in the nearly 40 years since he died, and the nearly 50 years since he ceased to be Jamaica's first and only Premier.

His emphasis on development was aimed not at concrete, but at people. Gordon House, the place where Parliament meets, expresses his thought perfectly. Gordon House has always been inadequate, and Manley knew it when he built it. He also knew that Jamaica could not afford the kind of Parliament building most people wanted, nor could we afford Jamaica House, which cost twice as much as a really grand Parliament building would have.

You will not be surprised to learn that Jamaica developed faster and more solidly under Norman Manley's guidance than it had before or has since. During his seven-year stewardship, agriculture accelerated to new rates of productivity, because of measures such as the Facilities for Titles Act and the various measures to give farmers access to cheap finance and stable markets.

In seven years, Manley changed the face of Jamaica. His free education initiative, which he admitted was even then inadequate, is still the basis for the Jamaican education system half-a-century and a million more people later.

He renegotiated the bauxite agreements and put the new money into capital development projects, especially in education; and he built most of the institutions which now bear the infrastructure of Jamaica: the Bank of Jamaica, the Planning Institute, Cabinet government; the social development agencies, the government's information services, the Army, the tourist industry, environmental law, and, of course, the now defunct JBC, killed by Messrs Seaga and Patterson.

While Manley was a socialist, he never made it an issue. As David Coore, speaking on his behalf at the time said: "Socialism is a label." In this he was much better advised than his son, Michael, whose rhetoric provoked a violent response from the Jamaica Labour Party, which recognised that if Manley were allowed to succeed, that would be the end of the JLP.

Today, half-a-century after Norman Manley came to office, another PNP prime minister has been announcing that he will, in the course of time, be demitting office.

This prime minister has said that Norman Manley was his mentor. N W certainly gave him preferment, seeing in him a talented young Jamaican who he thought had what it took to lead this country.

In my opinion, that was one of Manley's few mistakes. I cannot imagine Manley, about to demit office, admonishing the country to take up tasks which he ought to have taken up years before. I cannot imagine Manley leaving behind him a party so disorganised, so disunited and so undistinguished in leadership. Manley, unlike P J Patterson, was not afraid of bright people. He surrounded himself with them and there was not a yes-man in the lot.

Since then, the PNP has managed to go down to defeat in St Ann, where Ivan Lloyd won the first seat ever by a political party in the history of modern Jamaica. Not even Lloyd himself could win his own seat (for his son) for the JLP when he changed sides. That P J Patterson has managed to do so is no ordinary achievement.

The present PM has insulated himself behind a phalanx of advisers, consultants and plain yes-men to the extent that he himself is hardly visible. His admirers, like Maxine Henry-Wilson, extol his unobtrusiveness, his refusal to be "in your face".

This trait may be appreciated by the businessmen and other beneficiaries of the Government's version of development. It appears to be less and less effective among the great mass of those who Mr Patterson's immediate predecessor called "the sufferers".

Unfortunately for Mr Patterson and the rest of us, there are a great many more 'sufferers' than ever before. As the gap between the classes increases and the social services disappear, and as the Government takes itself out of the faces of the public, there is an increasing public sentiment that the Jamaican ship of state is not just rudderless, it has also lost its propellers - its screws, as sailors call them.

Among the middle classes there is a general air of 'wha'-fe-do?' A sense of purposeless bemused drifting while the background noises get louder and more alarming. So when Mr Patterson advises us to have 'vision' and to 'organise', these seeds of wisdom fall now on ground overgrown by weeds where once the soil was merely fallow.

When his admirers point to his memorials, the Doomsday Highway, the Cartade assault on Long Mountain, most people are noticeably underwhelmed, especially those who watch the progress of the petroleum price index.

Mr Patterson is not in anybody's face, though he has all the justification to be, for instance, as a leader in the Third World, a fighter against the brutal intimacies of the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organisation. In our neighbourhood - the Caribbean - he has failed even to make a gesture of protection toward the Haitian people, and instead has reverted to his bad habits of 1994 when he sold out the refugees to the Americans in their floating slave barracoons. He is planning to deport nearly half of the refugees now here, effectively sending them back to their murderers and persecutors.

One would imagine that in the fight for survival, Jamaica would be at least in the front row, having occupied an honourable place there since 1958 when Norman Manley banned trade with South Africa in a hugely symbolic gesture against Apartheid.

Our relatively privileged position obliges us to defend those less able than we are and to succour the suffering. Neither internationally nor domestically has our prime minister made a single gesture in those directions.

Ten years ago when the university published its study of crime and violence in the urban slums, many of us believed that such a government as that promised by the PNP would move (as had Norman Manley before he even entered politics) to work for the development of the people, to work for peace, harmony, the reconciliation of families and the raising up of communities. They Cry Respect - the 1995 UWI publication - was a blueprint for what could at least have been attempted.

I am sorry to bore you with a nine-year-old quotation, but I am compelled to remind people of where we were then:
'What the people want above all, the people want peace. They are brutalised, terrorised, victimised and separated from the rest of us by what they call "The War".

They are orphaned and left childless by the war. Although the conditions for the war were set by politicians, they no longer control the parameters of the conflict. The people want an end to the war, an end to the guns and the 'donmanship.'

".Nutten naw gwaan inna de ghetto" because of the ghetto stigma which disrupts schools, destroys the possibility of work, tears apart families, kills men, women, children and babies.

"The people want some sort of mediation process to begin, involving the community institutions, the clubs, the church, the police and even the politicians. The people want the 'bad guys' removed from the area to be counselled, perhaps subjected to semi-military discipline, re-trained."

That was in May 1996. Now, when Mr Patterson talks about 'vision' and all the other virtues we need to display, I ask myself where, but WHERE, was Mr Patterson in 1996? At that time he was saying what Dr Phillips, his preferred successor, is saying now. Mr Patterson was instructing the police to use 'the full force of the law' to curb violence.

I will conclude with another quotation from a decade ago: "Peace is not simply an absence of war, it is a comprehensive programme engendering a unity of purpose and co-operative endeavour among all the people. It requires that we recognise a common interest in the welfare of all, that none of us can live content - or safe - if there is one of us in misery, terror or economic servitude.

We can neither be half free nor half rich. The wealthiest among us is as vulnerable to the unreason of the gun as is any handicapped infant vulnerable to abuse." Unfortunately, all the pretenders to Mr Patterson's throne, with the exception of Portia Simpson Miller, are cut from the same cloth as Patterson.

To a man, they seem to believe that people can eat statistics.

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