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After the storm?
Common Sense
John Maxwell
Sunday Observer, September 09, 2007
More than a decade ago, the late Professor Carl Stone and I had
a small disagreement. He had given it as his considered opinion
that Jamaica had settled itself into a pattern in which the
electorate swapped governments every 10 years or thereabouts. He
called it the Two-Term Syndrome, if I remember rightly.
John Maxwell
My theory was quite different: it was that, for a variety of
reasons, mainly having to do with its formation and history, the
People's National Party was what the Americans call the 'natural
party of government' and that the two-term phenomenon observed
by Stone was accidental and depended on various extreme factors
which, from time to time, propelled the Jamaica Labour Party
(JLP) into office.
Stone counted the first two elections under adult suffrage,
which I thought was a mistake, because the party system had not
yet come into any stable form, there were still too many
Independent candidates who could and did win seats (Sir Harold
Allan being only the most notable) and in any case, in 1949 the
PNP won more votes but fewer seats than the JLP.
It was my opinion that the JLP would have perished about 1961
from lack of support, had Norman Manley not rescued the party
with the referendum. Contrary to Mr Seaga's recent self-serving
memoir, Jamaica was never bitterly divided over federation; the
opposite was true.
Most people knew very little about the idea of federation and
what it might mean, and the argument against federation was on
the same level as the JLP's 1944 propaganda that the socialists
believed in sharing everything, so that if you had a goat and
your neighbour had not, the PNP would cut the goat in two in some lunatic ideal of equality.
The anti-federation forces within both parties similarly dealt
from ignorance; Jamaica would have to subsidise the smaller
islands. We would be flooded by job-seekers and the Jamaican
standard of living would fall.
Sounds crazy now? Sounded crazy then, but some people believed it.
Bustamante turned against federation for one simple reason: the
by-election to fill Robert Lightbourne's federal seat in St
Thomas revealed that the JLP was flat broke and was certain to
be beaten. Bustamante, a good poker player, folded. He would not
contest St Thomas, he said, because the JLP had decided that it was against federation.
So is history made
I was in Parliament the day that Tavares provoked Manley into
announcing a referendum on federation. I was horrified; so
shocked I felt like throwing up. Referenda are almost never won,
which is why there are so few of them. Manley had dealt
federation a huge blow in 1958 when he decided that the PNP
needed him more than did the federation, mainly because his
deputy, Noel Nethersole, had died and Manley didn't trust
Glasspole and Wills Isaacs not to tear the PNP apart. The
referendum, I was sure, would be federation's death blow.
The JLP, revivified by the referendum, narrowly won the 1962
elections, which Manley called - to 'do the honourable thing'.
It was another error. The PNP was still demoralised by the loss
of the referendum six months before and the subsequent collapse
of the federation. The JLP scraped into office.
After 10 years in which the party treated Jamaica as if it had
won the country in a lottery, the JLP had alienated all classes
of society. Bustamante's idea of prime ministerial leadership in
independence was simple: he had replaced the British Imperial
power and he behaved exactly as had Sir Arthur Richards between 1938 and 1943.
University professors and others had their passports taken away
for visiting Cuba, books of all sorts were banned, Stokely
Carmichael and Malcolm X were declared personae non gratae,
certain sermons were forbidden airplay, as were songs by people
like Bob Marley, Max Romeo and the Melodians. Small Axe, Better
Must Come and By The Rivers Of Babylon could be heard only from juke boxes in bars.
I was threatened with jail and one of my contributors was
threatened with deportation; the paper I edited financially
penalised in an effort to close it down. The newspaper, Abeng,
was burned down and Walter Rodney denied re-entry to Jamaica to
perform his job at the UWI. Marches by the unemployed were
banned and the JBC, the national radio station, was gagged and castrated.
The JLP won in 1967 what is loosely called an election. It was
one marked by the most egregious gerrymandering - geographical
and statistical. More than a third of the electorate was barred
from registration to vote and the JLP, with a tiny majority of
votes, won a lopsided majority in Parliament.
Meanwhile, the murder rate went from under 70 per annum to more
than 300 in 10 years. As Carl Stone said later, if the PNP had
not won in 1972 Jamaica would probably have gone up in flames,
despite the growth in GDP. That growth was due to two factors:
bauxite investment and the PNP's investment in agricultural
development: a programme which empowered small farmers and set
Jamaica on the way to producing much of what it consumed and more sugar than before or since.
There are all sorts of stories about how the PNP destroyed
Jamaica in the '70s, stories which are carefully edited to give no credit to the efforts of Mr Seaga's JLP.
At the end of the '80s, however, the figures disclosed that the
PNP had done marginally better in the '70s than the JLP in
the '80s, despite the fact that with the JLP in power, the
murder rate went down by half, despite the efforts of such as
Jim Brown and Claudius Mossop. And Mr Seaga, of course, had to
admit to the Rockefeller Commission that there wasn't any
Communist threat in Jamaica, despite what he had said before the 1980 elections .
When the PNP returned to office in 1989, it was a chastened
party, mindful of the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union
and aware of the destructive powers wielded by the IMF and the World Bank.
The PNP - under Michael Manley and more enthusiastically under
his successor, PJ Patterson - privatised like mad, divesting
(selling off) the national assets even more desperately than had
Seaga, liberalising away almost all controls on investment,
turning a blind eye to casinos, to environmental abuse,
retrenching like Herbert Hoover and turning skilled workers into
street higglers selling doughnuts, bottled water or sex and
drugs, or driving taxis for a living.
Patterson, realising last year that the jig was up and that the
PNP led by him would have been lucky to retain five seats in
Parliament, resigned after 15 punishing years. We thought that
Portia Simpson Miller would have cleaned house and introduced
new social programmes to empower the populace. But there were
ghosts in the machine - Patterson himself and his camp followers - who may very well have cost Portia the elections last week.
The Elections
It is an astonishing fact that 27 years after their last
election victory, powered and cheered on by a massive phalanx of
the media and big business, the JLP managed to have scraped home
with the tiniest majority in Jamaican parliamentary history. The
JLP needs to ask itself why.
As it is, I believe that had Portia not been the PNP leader, the
PNP would have lost many more seats than it did. That's why it
was so important to cut her down to size. Incidentally, she was
absolutely correct in refusing to concede on election night, and
if I were her, I would not concede until the election is
properly decided. That has not yet happened.
The press became a cheering section for the JLP. This newspaper
and the Gleaner were effectively organs of the Opposition. The
criticism of Portia Simpson was founded on pseudo-intellectual snobbery, classism and sexism.
As I pointed out last week, many journalists didn't bother to
check their facts. In Tuesday's Gleaner the paper alleged that
in Jamaica's 15 general elections the PNP had won only one more
than the JLP. Where have they been?
That fact is the benchmark in my view, for the quality of much
press/media coverage. I could receive only CVM TV on election
night, and was appalled to hear Michael Pryce declaring the
elections complete - at JLP headquarters - before the Electoral
Office had done so. I understand that his counterpart on TVJ did
the same thing. That should be recognised as so obviously dangerous that any comment from me is superfluous.
The elections revealed a long list of No-Nos. A few of them:
The prime minister obviously had not considered the hurricane
season when she announced the election date. The governor-
general was too politically naive to know that he could have
advised the prime minister about the confluence of events, but
he probably didn't think about that either, being environmentally unaware.
The Government's law officers effectively allowed the Electoral
Commission to assume the prime minister's prerogative in setting the date for the elections.
The Electoral Office usurped the law officers' prerogatives when
Mr Danville Walker announced that all candidates had been
properly nominated when it was clear that there were important
legal questions about the eligibility of foreign nationals to
contest Jamaican elections. Unless that point had been
unambiguously and publicly settled, Walker had no right to speak
on the matter. He has charge of the conduct of elections but
cannot, as far as I know, overrule the Constitution of Jamaica.
The JLP, as I theorised last week, may have shot itself in the
foot by pressing for the earliest date possible for elections.
Would it really have mattered had the elections been held in
October, outside of the height of the hurricane season? What
happens if there is a hurricane before the membership of
Parliament is settled and Parliament can meet?
A matter of principle
The owner of this newspaper and I have been friends for more
than 40 years, and although we do not see eye to eye on
politics, I believe that we have a friendship based on mutual respect.
That being so, I believe he did himself and Jamaica a serious
disservice by his well-intentioned action in distributing
millions of dollars to NGOs immediately before the elections.
Whether it was his money or someone else's, it does our
reputation no good to have stories of floods of dollars in the
hands of various worthies, some of whom may well have been members of NGOs.
This is particularly dangerous just before an election in which
his own newspaper was percieved as being heavily invested
against the Government. The fact that the money was for
hurricane relief and obviously intentioned to counter possible
government pork-barrel moves was not sufficient justification,
in my opinion, for the way in which the money was distributed. I
really don't think the ODPEM is a politically oriented organisation.
When we talk about accountability, I believe, we all need to be
accountable to the public interest. Even if every dollar was
spent on hurricane relief, there is no way that one half of
Jamaica's population will ever be satisfied that it was fair.
The JLP was clearly better organised and financed than the PNP.
For the first time in more than 50 years of my experience, JLP
polling day workers outnumbered those from the PNP, who were often not to be seen anywhere.
After this election, no matter what the final result, both
political parties need to do some serious work.
The PNP needs to clean house and reorganise itself. To some
extent the JLP needs to do the same.
Parliament, as a matter of urgency, should draft tough new
regulations governing the total conduct of elections and the
operations of political parties.
If we operate a democracy, the constituent parts must be democratic.
Parties must be compelled to organise themselves
democratically, so that they cannot easily be captured by small
factions. Elections within parties must be democratic from the bottom up.
This, therefore, is as good a time as any to decide that the
political process must be openly funded by the people. Election
finance always comes out of the pockets of the public, one way
or another. The public is entitled to an accounting of how their money is spent, by whom and for what purposes.
Additionally, we need to make some rules for journalistic
activity during elections. Anyone can publish an alleged poll
that makes statements that cannot be verified by anyone else.
These statements, appearing to be authoritative, have power to
decisively influence how people vote. We need further and better
particulars about the conduct of the polls, who paid for them and so on.
There should be, in my opinion, a ban on the publication of
polls for at least a week before an election. It may also be a
good idea to ban all political activity for two or three days before the election, to give the public space to breathe and time to think.
Since this would apply to everybody I cannot see how it can hurt
anyone, and with an electorate as supposedly 'volatile' as ours,
it may be just what we and the forces of law and order need to
ensure that elections not only appear to be free and fair, but
are manifestly and unequivocally free and fair.
Copyright©2007 John Maxwell
[email protected]
Common Sense
John Maxwell
Sunday Observer, September 09, 2007
More than a decade ago, the late Professor Carl Stone and I had
a small disagreement. He had given it as his considered opinion
that Jamaica had settled itself into a pattern in which the
electorate swapped governments every 10 years or thereabouts. He
called it the Two-Term Syndrome, if I remember rightly.
John Maxwell
My theory was quite different: it was that, for a variety of
reasons, mainly having to do with its formation and history, the
People's National Party was what the Americans call the 'natural
party of government' and that the two-term phenomenon observed
by Stone was accidental and depended on various extreme factors
which, from time to time, propelled the Jamaica Labour Party
(JLP) into office.
Stone counted the first two elections under adult suffrage,
which I thought was a mistake, because the party system had not
yet come into any stable form, there were still too many
Independent candidates who could and did win seats (Sir Harold
Allan being only the most notable) and in any case, in 1949 the
PNP won more votes but fewer seats than the JLP.
It was my opinion that the JLP would have perished about 1961
from lack of support, had Norman Manley not rescued the party
with the referendum. Contrary to Mr Seaga's recent self-serving
memoir, Jamaica was never bitterly divided over federation; the
opposite was true.
Most people knew very little about the idea of federation and
what it might mean, and the argument against federation was on
the same level as the JLP's 1944 propaganda that the socialists
believed in sharing everything, so that if you had a goat and
your neighbour had not, the PNP would cut the goat in two in some lunatic ideal of equality.
The anti-federation forces within both parties similarly dealt
from ignorance; Jamaica would have to subsidise the smaller
islands. We would be flooded by job-seekers and the Jamaican
standard of living would fall.
Sounds crazy now? Sounded crazy then, but some people believed it.
Bustamante turned against federation for one simple reason: the
by-election to fill Robert Lightbourne's federal seat in St
Thomas revealed that the JLP was flat broke and was certain to
be beaten. Bustamante, a good poker player, folded. He would not
contest St Thomas, he said, because the JLP had decided that it was against federation.
So is history made
I was in Parliament the day that Tavares provoked Manley into
announcing a referendum on federation. I was horrified; so
shocked I felt like throwing up. Referenda are almost never won,
which is why there are so few of them. Manley had dealt
federation a huge blow in 1958 when he decided that the PNP
needed him more than did the federation, mainly because his
deputy, Noel Nethersole, had died and Manley didn't trust
Glasspole and Wills Isaacs not to tear the PNP apart. The
referendum, I was sure, would be federation's death blow.
The JLP, revivified by the referendum, narrowly won the 1962
elections, which Manley called - to 'do the honourable thing'.
It was another error. The PNP was still demoralised by the loss
of the referendum six months before and the subsequent collapse
of the federation. The JLP scraped into office.
After 10 years in which the party treated Jamaica as if it had
won the country in a lottery, the JLP had alienated all classes
of society. Bustamante's idea of prime ministerial leadership in
independence was simple: he had replaced the British Imperial
power and he behaved exactly as had Sir Arthur Richards between 1938 and 1943.
University professors and others had their passports taken away
for visiting Cuba, books of all sorts were banned, Stokely
Carmichael and Malcolm X were declared personae non gratae,
certain sermons were forbidden airplay, as were songs by people
like Bob Marley, Max Romeo and the Melodians. Small Axe, Better
Must Come and By The Rivers Of Babylon could be heard only from juke boxes in bars.
I was threatened with jail and one of my contributors was
threatened with deportation; the paper I edited financially
penalised in an effort to close it down. The newspaper, Abeng,
was burned down and Walter Rodney denied re-entry to Jamaica to
perform his job at the UWI. Marches by the unemployed were
banned and the JBC, the national radio station, was gagged and castrated.
The JLP won in 1967 what is loosely called an election. It was
one marked by the most egregious gerrymandering - geographical
and statistical. More than a third of the electorate was barred
from registration to vote and the JLP, with a tiny majority of
votes, won a lopsided majority in Parliament.
Meanwhile, the murder rate went from under 70 per annum to more
than 300 in 10 years. As Carl Stone said later, if the PNP had
not won in 1972 Jamaica would probably have gone up in flames,
despite the growth in GDP. That growth was due to two factors:
bauxite investment and the PNP's investment in agricultural
development: a programme which empowered small farmers and set
Jamaica on the way to producing much of what it consumed and more sugar than before or since.
There are all sorts of stories about how the PNP destroyed
Jamaica in the '70s, stories which are carefully edited to give no credit to the efforts of Mr Seaga's JLP.
At the end of the '80s, however, the figures disclosed that the
PNP had done marginally better in the '70s than the JLP in
the '80s, despite the fact that with the JLP in power, the
murder rate went down by half, despite the efforts of such as
Jim Brown and Claudius Mossop. And Mr Seaga, of course, had to
admit to the Rockefeller Commission that there wasn't any
Communist threat in Jamaica, despite what he had said before the 1980 elections .
When the PNP returned to office in 1989, it was a chastened
party, mindful of the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union
and aware of the destructive powers wielded by the IMF and the World Bank.
The PNP - under Michael Manley and more enthusiastically under
his successor, PJ Patterson - privatised like mad, divesting
(selling off) the national assets even more desperately than had
Seaga, liberalising away almost all controls on investment,
turning a blind eye to casinos, to environmental abuse,
retrenching like Herbert Hoover and turning skilled workers into
street higglers selling doughnuts, bottled water or sex and
drugs, or driving taxis for a living.
Patterson, realising last year that the jig was up and that the
PNP led by him would have been lucky to retain five seats in
Parliament, resigned after 15 punishing years. We thought that
Portia Simpson Miller would have cleaned house and introduced
new social programmes to empower the populace. But there were
ghosts in the machine - Patterson himself and his camp followers - who may very well have cost Portia the elections last week.
The Elections
It is an astonishing fact that 27 years after their last
election victory, powered and cheered on by a massive phalanx of
the media and big business, the JLP managed to have scraped home
with the tiniest majority in Jamaican parliamentary history. The
JLP needs to ask itself why.
As it is, I believe that had Portia not been the PNP leader, the
PNP would have lost many more seats than it did. That's why it
was so important to cut her down to size. Incidentally, she was
absolutely correct in refusing to concede on election night, and
if I were her, I would not concede until the election is
properly decided. That has not yet happened.
The press became a cheering section for the JLP. This newspaper
and the Gleaner were effectively organs of the Opposition. The
criticism of Portia Simpson was founded on pseudo-intellectual snobbery, classism and sexism.
As I pointed out last week, many journalists didn't bother to
check their facts. In Tuesday's Gleaner the paper alleged that
in Jamaica's 15 general elections the PNP had won only one more
than the JLP. Where have they been?
That fact is the benchmark in my view, for the quality of much
press/media coverage. I could receive only CVM TV on election
night, and was appalled to hear Michael Pryce declaring the
elections complete - at JLP headquarters - before the Electoral
Office had done so. I understand that his counterpart on TVJ did
the same thing. That should be recognised as so obviously dangerous that any comment from me is superfluous.
The elections revealed a long list of No-Nos. A few of them:
The prime minister obviously had not considered the hurricane
season when she announced the election date. The governor-
general was too politically naive to know that he could have
advised the prime minister about the confluence of events, but
he probably didn't think about that either, being environmentally unaware.
The Government's law officers effectively allowed the Electoral
Commission to assume the prime minister's prerogative in setting the date for the elections.
The Electoral Office usurped the law officers' prerogatives when
Mr Danville Walker announced that all candidates had been
properly nominated when it was clear that there were important
legal questions about the eligibility of foreign nationals to
contest Jamaican elections. Unless that point had been
unambiguously and publicly settled, Walker had no right to speak
on the matter. He has charge of the conduct of elections but
cannot, as far as I know, overrule the Constitution of Jamaica.
The JLP, as I theorised last week, may have shot itself in the
foot by pressing for the earliest date possible for elections.
Would it really have mattered had the elections been held in
October, outside of the height of the hurricane season? What
happens if there is a hurricane before the membership of
Parliament is settled and Parliament can meet?
A matter of principle
The owner of this newspaper and I have been friends for more
than 40 years, and although we do not see eye to eye on
politics, I believe that we have a friendship based on mutual respect.
That being so, I believe he did himself and Jamaica a serious
disservice by his well-intentioned action in distributing
millions of dollars to NGOs immediately before the elections.
Whether it was his money or someone else's, it does our
reputation no good to have stories of floods of dollars in the
hands of various worthies, some of whom may well have been members of NGOs.
This is particularly dangerous just before an election in which
his own newspaper was percieved as being heavily invested
against the Government. The fact that the money was for
hurricane relief and obviously intentioned to counter possible
government pork-barrel moves was not sufficient justification,
in my opinion, for the way in which the money was distributed. I
really don't think the ODPEM is a politically oriented organisation.
When we talk about accountability, I believe, we all need to be
accountable to the public interest. Even if every dollar was
spent on hurricane relief, there is no way that one half of
Jamaica's population will ever be satisfied that it was fair.
The JLP was clearly better organised and financed than the PNP.
For the first time in more than 50 years of my experience, JLP
polling day workers outnumbered those from the PNP, who were often not to be seen anywhere.
After this election, no matter what the final result, both
political parties need to do some serious work.
The PNP needs to clean house and reorganise itself. To some
extent the JLP needs to do the same.
Parliament, as a matter of urgency, should draft tough new
regulations governing the total conduct of elections and the
operations of political parties.
If we operate a democracy, the constituent parts must be democratic.
Parties must be compelled to organise themselves
democratically, so that they cannot easily be captured by small
factions. Elections within parties must be democratic from the bottom up.
This, therefore, is as good a time as any to decide that the
political process must be openly funded by the people. Election
finance always comes out of the pockets of the public, one way
or another. The public is entitled to an accounting of how their money is spent, by whom and for what purposes.
Additionally, we need to make some rules for journalistic
activity during elections. Anyone can publish an alleged poll
that makes statements that cannot be verified by anyone else.
These statements, appearing to be authoritative, have power to
decisively influence how people vote. We need further and better
particulars about the conduct of the polls, who paid for them and so on.
There should be, in my opinion, a ban on the publication of
polls for at least a week before an election. It may also be a
good idea to ban all political activity for two or three days before the election, to give the public space to breathe and time to think.
Since this would apply to everybody I cannot see how it can hurt
anyone, and with an electorate as supposedly 'volatile' as ours,
it may be just what we and the forces of law and order need to
ensure that elections not only appear to be free and fair, but
are manifestly and unequivocally free and fair.
Copyright©2007 John Maxwell
[email protected]
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