Maziki Thame | The People’s National Party and our collective future

We are currently in a period of democratic crisis. It does not take the form of violent elections and overvoting as occurred in the past, but of popular apathy and attendant low levels of participation. At the 2020 Bocas Literary Festival panel discussion on ‘The Question of Leadership’, Alissa Trotz probed the validity of the notion of a landslide or a sweeping victory for the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). She asserted instead that what we have in Jamaica is a minority government.

With the lowest voter turnout in Jamaica’s electoral history, 21 per cent of the electorate brought a government to power. This does not mean that the People’s National Party (PNP), with just 14 of 63 seats, cannot act as an opposition ‘outside of power’ or that the people can’t demand accountability. But that kind of democratic impulse seems missing, evidenced by the disorganisation of the people and the PNP.

The performance of the PNP at the polls signals a party out of touch with its supporters and without a message to inspire participation of the population. In 2016 it was in a similar place. The PNP did not live up to the expectations held by the Jamaican people when they elected Portia Simpson Miller. She had appealed to us as a woman from the bottom who would defend the people, but as a party, the PNP did not seem to have fully appreciated the meaning of her.

Through the personalities of Alexander Bustamante and Norman Manley, the political parties they founded came to be associated with the struggles of everyday Jamaicans, coming out of the labour struggles of the 1930s.

With all the ills associated with the middle-class sensibility of Norman Manley and the authoritarianism of Alexander Bustamante, they promised to ‘come down from high and help the little people’. Their parties were bred out of working-class struggle and this was integral to the people’s generational attachment to the PNP and JLP.

In the post-independence period that attachment grew in terms of access to the spoils of the nation, most problematically through what political scientist Carl Stone termed garrison politics. Garrison politics goes deeper than access to resources and functions as identity politics. Identification with either party as such has prevented us from seeing and organising in collective terms. At its worst, it devolved into violent politics in the ideological struggle of the 1970s.

DEFINING PERIOD

The 1970s was in other ways an important and defining period of Jamaican history. Following on the demands of Black Power in the late 1960s, Jamaica’s ideological battle was also class conflict. Then, the JLP was out of touch with the aspirations of the Jamaican people who wanted to see themselves in power of all types. On the PNP side, the leadership was swayed by the working class and their allies in the class struggle.

That class struggle was especially borne out in relation to women’s activism and women as representative of the voice and experience of the poor through their position as mothers and heads of households. Their struggles for maternity leave, consumer protection, minimum wage, etc, were all rooted in the realities facing large sections of Jamaican people because of their class position.

The achievements of the decade were not because of Michael alone. They were based on the agitation of the people and the joining of the PNP leadership, middle-class intellectuals and other radicals with the struggles of the people. Many of those intellectuals and middle-class youth had been radicalised through Black Power and their location as young people of independence not seeing its benefits. Politics was perceived as the route to change and political action bore fruit.

In her interview on Beyond the Headlines after the passing of her husband D.K. Duncan, Beverley Manley Duncan said that more women in the House may come to naught because there is no women’s movement to give them power or to push agendas for women. She spoke to her own power as leader of the PNP Women’s Movement (PNPWM) being based in knowing that she had women inside and outside of the party who had her back. She referenced the PNPWM’s alliances with Christian women, JLP women and communist women.

Manley Duncan was drawing our attention to methods of change and the differences between the period of expansion of rights in the 1970s and the present, where we live with the threat of a creeping authoritarianism. That threat is evidenced by the permanence of states of emergency (SOE) as a crime-control measure. While the judiciary’s ruling on detentions in SOEs would effectively constrain the power of the Government, the JLP has signalled its intention to appeal the judgment. The people must locate themselves on those issues because popular disengagement with politics is the route to democratic collapse.

1970S IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRATISATION

In spite of the conflict of the period, the 1970s was important to the democratisation of Jamaica. By that, I am referring to the expansion of participatory frameworks in which even school youth were mobilised and making demands such as to wear Afros in school, and to an expansion of access to power and the resources of the state.

The lesson of the 1930s and 1970s is clear for the PNP and the Jamaican people. The future rests with rooting the political party in the everyday realities of the people. We are told that the battle for the PNP leadership is now about money and that the two candidates who have put their hats in the ring have it. But Hanna’s supporters told us that it is ‘woman time now’ and that Golding is too ‘speaky-spokey’. They are telling us they want to see themselves in the leadership. The people are still looking for Portia.

Beyond the class realities of Hanna and Golding, we should ask: How will they represent the broader Jamaican population? How will they bring their class into consensus that goes beyond the interests of people with money? How will they ready the people to represent themselves, beyond their attachment to leadership?

The people must be implored to invest in their futures through participating in decisions about their present. The PNP must locate itself in relation to the people. The path they take will determine whether our collective future is a democratic one.

- Dr Maziki Thame is a senior lecturer at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, The University of the West Indies, Mona. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com