Tweet
After the storm?
Common Sense
John Maxwell
Sunday, 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
jankunnu@gmail.com
Common Sense
John Maxwell
Sunday, 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 MaxwellMy 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
jankunnu@gmail.com
Comment