Ewart Walters | The vision thing and the PNP

The decision by the People’s National Party (PNP) to establish a Vision Committee is an indication that it wants to move in the right direction. For where there is no vision, the people will just continue perishing. So the PNP’s decision would be good for a Jamaica where almost two-thirds of the voting population (63%) didn’t bother to vote at the last election. And most of those people were PNP voters who have lost faith in the party.

Today, with little hope in people’s hearts, there is hardly any aspect of Jamaican life that is not infested with crookery, banditry or vulgarity.

If Jamaica is ever to emerge from the sociopathic lawlessness and disdain for the common people to which it has fettered itself since 1980, it will happen under the leadership of a reinvigorated PNP that once again focuses on building the nation. But the resignation en bloc of its four vice-presidents is a clear X-ray picture of a sick body that was once united and thriving.

Created in 1938 by several groups and individuals around an agreed set of principles and activities designed to achieve nationhood for Jamaica, the PNP, nevertheless, is today playing blind man’s bluff with personalities instead of principles.

For this, Jamaica has suffered. The voting public has turned its back on the electoral process. They joyfully garb themselves in party colours to take whatever money they can get for their vote because they know they can expect nothing after that, as politicians ignore them and enrich themselves. And, of course, the PNP has always run a poor second to the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) in the money stakes.

In 2015 when I was presenting a copy of my book, We Come From Jamaica: The National Movement 1937-1962, to a high official of the JLP, he asked me “So, the JLP wasn’t part of the national movement?”

“No,” I replied.

The JLP was Bustamante. And not only had he left the national movement, he launched a loud campaign against it.

CREATED BY ONE MAN

You ask what I mean that the JLP was Bustamante. The JLP was created by one man, Bustamante, to save his own skin. Promised freedom from detention by the British governor if he formed a party to fight against the PNP, he called several members of his BITU and a few others to launch the JLP, five years after the PNP started. There was no nation-building programme.

The PNP’s birth was quite different.

The PNP had a plan and a programme. The immediate purpose was to obtain self-government and independence. The party was formed by members of Ken Hill’s National Reform Association, members of the New York-based Jamaica Progressive League, members of the Jamaica Union of Teachers, the Jamaica Agricultural Society (JAS), the Saint Andrew Literary & Debating Society, the Kingston and Saint Andrew Taxpayers and Ratepayers Association, the Federation of Citizens’ Associations and its constituent bodies, and the trade unions.

The man who began setting the foundation, O.T. Fairclough, never made any claims about his efforts. Neither did the man who became its founding leader, Norman Manley. Leadership was by consensus. And when the 1955 election made the PNP the government, it was Cabinet leadership, not chief minister’s leadership, which held sway.

But the shock of the brutal unrelenting terrorism deployed between 1976 and 1980 by the JLP and others who set out to topple Prime Minister Michael Manley sent the PNP into a tailspin from which it has never fully recovered – despite P.J. Patterson, Portia Simpson Miller and Peter Phillips.

WELFARE STATE

Jamaica had been a welfare state for all of its written history. The enslaved people had neither money nor education, but they had food, clothing, and accommodation. After slavery, there was need for accommodation and employment, but the people now had hospitals in Lionel Town, Falmouth, Savanna-la-Mar and other places, and cinemas and/or cricket fields in sugar-cane areas, including Duckenfield, Reid’s Pen, Innswood, Gray’s Inn, and Dumfries.

This changed precipitously in 1981. Returning from a visit to US President Ronald Reagan, Prime Minister Edward Seaga announced a drastic change. “You are on your own,” he told the people. “The government can’t help you any more.”

With those words Jamaica moved suddenly from being a welfare state to become a place that began wearing the dirty, ill-fitting, voodoo economics-clothes of privatisation, structural adjustment, dictatorship and anti-unionism, along with all the other trappings of trickle-down economics that were created for big countries with a different history and much broader economies.

But nation-building took a back seat. Even when the PNP was returned to power it remained on a back seat. Indeed, the PNP, apparently awestruck by the US-assisted deadly atrocities of the five-year civil war, now focused on adapting JLP mechanisms.

Indeed, when the deposed Michael Manley sat down to write his first book after the 1980 election, Jamaica: Struggle in the Periphery, his first words were an expression of regret for the lives lost during the period.

Then, the country watched in disbelief as JLP Prime Minister Bruce Golding, looking like Michael Manley reincarnated, adopted foundational PNP planks of free healthcare and education, planks the post-1980 PNP abandoned with their tails between their legs. (Too bad Bruce messed up with Dudus!)

Then, the PNP adopted leadership squabbles that were once seen as the province of the JLP. And up to now that problem has not been exorcised. But hope springs eternal.

First, the USA is currently making far-reaching changes. They are turning their backs on 40 years of right-wing Reaganomics. And the impact will spread across the world.

These changes have two drivers. One is the pandemic and how ex-president Trump mangled it. The other is US President Joe Biden with his focus on the people and his strong declaration against “trickle-down” economics.”

“Trickle-down has never worked,” he said.

For what is democracy (government of the people, for the people, by the people) if it does not look after the people?

In his farewell address to the nation, Norman Manley cited his party’s achievement of political independence, and stated what was left to be done. Social development and economic development, he said, being quite careful to place social before economic. But the objectives of both parties in government since then has been trying to develop the economy – with scant regard for social development.

IT CAN’T WORK

It can’t work. It has not worked. Mothers fearing dons, selling their underage daughters into prostitution, squatters everywhere, the gun now absolutely a tool of work, people being murdered left, right and centre, people’s houses being burnt when they fail to obey a don’s ‘request’, a justice system in which very few have faith because it spares the ‘Mr Bigs’ and politicians, an understaffed and underpaid police force, an army of women whose only recourse is to sell ‘the thing’, and a growing set of young boys whose only sustenance is from banditry.

So, finally, there appears to be change in the PNP itself. The focus now is on the nation. The people. In a Gleaner interview, PNP vision committee chairman Anthony Bogues goes to the nub of the issue – recapturing the nation-building spirit of the national movement.

“How do you create a society where ordinary people can say I can see life? That was what N.W. Manley and O.T. Fairclough thought of when they formed the PNP,” Professor Bogues said.

He touched, too, on the matters of money, unity and party discipline by saying the PNP must begin to speak with one voice. It was a formidable PNP, Bogues said, that would have led the “kind of advocacy currently being led by Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley”.

But unless there is a vision, and unless that vision comes from the people and is clearly in their interest, and is repeated to them constantly in a programme of political education, the trust in political parties will continue its downward spiral as evidenced in ever-dwindling turnout at the polls.

- Ewart Walters is an author, journalist, and former diplomat. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and spectrum@storm.ca.