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Trinidad and Tobago could not fail to be impressed by the smoothness of the transition that enabled Bruce Golding to be succeeded as Jamaican Prime Minister by Andrew Holness. The change which occurred at the topmost level of the political and governmental chief executive position appeared to entail but the smallest ripple of disturbance on the surface of Jamaican public affairs.
A relative absence of drama, even melodrama, in how the changeover was accomplished must inevitably strike people in the southernmost Caricom islands as extraordinary. For T&T has been a country that once kept the same Prime Minister, Eric Eustace Williams, for a quarter of a century until his decease in 1981. Again, it took the most severe of political earthquakes to dislodge former prime minister Basdeo Panday from his nearly quarter-century perch as leader of the UNC, the party of which he also enjoyed credentials as founder.
By May 2010, T&T had once again been stuck with a Prime Minister, Patrick Manning, exercising office well past his "expiry date." Upon the occasion when he led his party into near-obliterating electoral defeat, Mr Manning had been Prime Minister for more than eight unbroken years.
Within the then-ruling PNM, he had already incurred the implacable dissent of at least one long-standing colleague in Keith Rowley. During the April-May 2010 general election campaign, Dr Rowley publicly entertained the prospect of "court-martialling" Mr Manning in the latter's capacity as "captain", at the most politically convenient opportunity.
The political "court martial" is yet be convened, even though Dr Rowley acceded to PNM leadership, after Mr Manning was all but pelted out of Balisier House by disgusted PNM party members. It took more than a year before the former leader found it possible to acknowledge the grievous error of his governmental and political ways, and to offer even an equivocal "apology".
It's in this sense that T&T stands to learn from the relatively finessing ways of its Caricom partner in the north. Failing the change of leader, Mr Golding would have been going into upcoming elections with more liabilities than would have been safe for his party and for his political reputation.
Pointedly, Mr Holness, in his first prime ministerial address, he vowed to end Jamaica's notorious "garrison poltics''. Such politics, intimately connected with criminal gangs, had been the basis of the Dudus Coke crisis, with its fatally wounding effects on Mr Golding's prime ministership.
At 39, Mr Holness, who has already served as Education Minister, and as Leader of the Government Business in the Jamaican Parliament, is a newly risen political star in Jamaica. He will doubtless find a welcome around Caricom, where the regional movement is in need of the freshness, and vigour, and readiness to embark on new departures that Mr Holness' relative youth appears to promise.
A relative absence of drama, even melodrama, in how the changeover was accomplished must inevitably strike people in the southernmost Caricom islands as extraordinary. For T&T has been a country that once kept the same Prime Minister, Eric Eustace Williams, for a quarter of a century until his decease in 1981. Again, it took the most severe of political earthquakes to dislodge former prime minister Basdeo Panday from his nearly quarter-century perch as leader of the UNC, the party of which he also enjoyed credentials as founder.
By May 2010, T&T had once again been stuck with a Prime Minister, Patrick Manning, exercising office well past his "expiry date." Upon the occasion when he led his party into near-obliterating electoral defeat, Mr Manning had been Prime Minister for more than eight unbroken years.
Within the then-ruling PNM, he had already incurred the implacable dissent of at least one long-standing colleague in Keith Rowley. During the April-May 2010 general election campaign, Dr Rowley publicly entertained the prospect of "court-martialling" Mr Manning in the latter's capacity as "captain", at the most politically convenient opportunity.
The political "court martial" is yet be convened, even though Dr Rowley acceded to PNM leadership, after Mr Manning was all but pelted out of Balisier House by disgusted PNM party members. It took more than a year before the former leader found it possible to acknowledge the grievous error of his governmental and political ways, and to offer even an equivocal "apology".
It's in this sense that T&T stands to learn from the relatively finessing ways of its Caricom partner in the north. Failing the change of leader, Mr Golding would have been going into upcoming elections with more liabilities than would have been safe for his party and for his political reputation.
Pointedly, Mr Holness, in his first prime ministerial address, he vowed to end Jamaica's notorious "garrison poltics''. Such politics, intimately connected with criminal gangs, had been the basis of the Dudus Coke crisis, with its fatally wounding effects on Mr Golding's prime ministership.
At 39, Mr Holness, who has already served as Education Minister, and as Leader of the Government Business in the Jamaican Parliament, is a newly risen political star in Jamaica. He will doubtless find a welcome around Caricom, where the regional movement is in need of the freshness, and vigour, and readiness to embark on new departures that Mr Holness' relative youth appears to promise.
http://www.trinidadexpress.com/commentaries/What_T_T_can_learn_from_Jamaican_finesse-132976058.html
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