Ronald Thwaites | Building strong institutions

Strong institutions make for a free society. Soon after the founding of the new United States, French journalist Alexis de Tocqueville toured the country and concluded that the strength of democracy was best assured by the multiplicity of popular organisations-communities of commerce, religion and of every common pursuit of humankind.

History has validated his observation, even if, in the current age, the bonds of community, of common purpose amidst disparity, are clearly strained in that nation.

JAMAICAN INSTITUTIONS

Jamaica is a young nation and many of our institutions have not matured to guarantee sustainability. Businesses rise and fall, politics operates in a way to exclude and alienate many. The sequestration of family land for mining has wrecked peasant culture. Poverty, alienation and weak familial bonds continue to fuel migration. Most churches are in decline. Mercifully, school allegiance most often thrives.

LEADERSHIP MATTERS

Leadership has a lot to do with institutional strength and durability. Those who are in it for self-aggrandisement (material or psychological) end up by their posture, defeating the usefulness of the institution they head. The charismatic leader who centres control around him or herself assures decline when mortality, misfortune or rebellion catches up with them.

Then there are some whose moral grounding and generosity of spirit make them so comfortable in the castle of their skin and in the spirituality of their convictions that they lead with the strength of humility and patriotism. They enable rather than disable their collaborators and successors.

These latter characteristics were what endears me to Portia Simpson Miller. She led with the confidence of who she was, no pretence, no hubris, truthful about what she did not know, powerful in her belly-bottom instincts about her people and their needs, no selfish baggage. Kinda like how I read Pope Francis.

FIRSTBORN

I got the same feeling when reading the biography Firstborn, the life of Luis Fred Kennedy, written by his son, Fred Kennedy, and launched last week.

This is the tale of a Jamaican of our times whose leadership, along with others, built the superstructure of a valuable, century-old institution, Grace Kennedy, in the most difficult years of the world war, the fretful pre- and post-independence age, to become, indisputably, one of the few companies so deeply ingrained in and emblematic of home-grown Jamaican success.

BUSINESS ETHICS

Because there is such potential benefit for us to draw for the present, it is purposeful to reflect on Mr Kennedy’s life and work. I choose two themes. First, why, and with what motive or philosophy did Luis Fred Kennedy live and do business the way he did. Second is to revisit that tumultuous period of the 1970s when Kennedy, his company, the nation and its government, contended so viciously and fatefully. Are there lessons to be learned?

This businessman believed that ethical and ultimately religious principles are essential to nation-building, commercial integrity; the longevity of any enterprise, prosperity and personal satisfaction. Between the 1930s and the 1950s when many felt that all we were good for was to be well-behaved lap-boys of Empire, selling cheap to them and buying dear from them, Mr. Kennedy led those opponents of the colonial order who believed in the capacity and goodness of the Jamaican people, as being worthy of participation and partnership, whoever and whatever colour they were.

PROGRESSIVE

He led the way of worker participation by offering shares from the hitherto family-owned company to its employees. He initiated social security benefits for port workers in conjunction with Hugh Shearer, to make that work site among the most prized, then and now. All of this was well before the epochal ‘70s.

Capitalist and free-enterprise advocate to the core, what motivated this progressive stance and made GraceKennedy different from the general business climate of the time?

Luis Fred Kennedy was a deeply religious man, educated by the Jesuits and convinced that narrow self-interest and raw greed are abhorrent and that the most worthy purpose of human effort is to serve God and fellow humankind.

He was aware and appreciative of the nascent credit union movement, birthed of the same spiritual principles translated into humane economic institutions and arguably, alongside the stock exchange, the most inclusive and therefore revolutionary financial institutions created in 20th-century Jamaica.

AVOIDABLE CONFLICT?

Ideas are powerful. Commitment to sacred causes is invincible. Kennedy took on the ‘bakra-massa’ governors whose protectionism would stifle the prospects of an emerging coloured middle class.

Later, and for me tragically, he took on Michael Manley, not because their principles about workers rights, human rights and women’s rights differed, but because Michael’s styling of the nation’s problems in the language of class conflict and the promotion of statism were morally and practically repugnant to someone of Kennedy’s ilk.

After all, by that time, GraceKennedy had liberated itself from part-Canadian ownership, was further broadening its equity base and increasing its local sources of raw material, so deepening its reach into the local economy.

In the end, Kennedy and many others, overtaken by fear of instability, migrated, leaving his heart-string, as well as his navel-string here. Fortunately, given the way his moral outlook had guided his business style, he had provided for strong succession at GraceKennedy.

Michael Manley, custodian of the hopes and the soulcase of so many, then and still now, left the stage with his dream of a fair society and inclusive economy unfulfilled.

AND NOW?

So where does the story of ‘Firstborn’ leave us? We remain citizens of a land still without a captivating humanistic philosophy, strong elements of which the theistic Kennedy and the secularist Manley shared, but never communicated that they shared. Our social and political culture is still riddled with their alienation.

Our fate is way better than many other countries, God knows, but is still way short of the potential which the likes of Kennedy and Manley dreamed.

Why do we walk the path of unnecessary divisiveness still? Fred Kennedy’s biography of his father’s life and times as well as the deeply riveted nationalist business approach of the company he nurtured, can excite thought about how the past can help us to recognise and celebrate our worthy foundations while avoiding our often self-inflicted ambushes.

Firstborn, The Life of Luis Fred Kennedy, as told by his son, Fred W. Kennedy, is available in local bookstores and on Amazon.

Rev Ronald G Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.