Editorial | Any lessons in Jess’ victory?

The People’s National Party’s (PNP) constituency delegates in St Elizabeth North East likely did their party a favour on Sunday. They elected Zuleika Jess to be the PNP’s candidate for the next general election, constitutionally due in 2025.

More to the point, the delegates rejected Kern Spencer by an overwhelming margin. Of the 1,274 eligible delegates, 780, or 61.2 per cent, voted. A whopping 73 per cent – 569 – cast their ballot for Ms Jess, a political transplant from the Central Clarendon constituency, where she was twice defeated in elections by the Jamaica Labour Party’s (JLP) Mike Henry.

Notably, Ms Jess beat the home boy, and former parliamentary representative for the constituency, by a margin of more than two-to-one. Mr Spencer harrumphed about 400 delegates being barred from voting, apparently representatives of constituency groups that the PNP headquarters ruled ineligible.

As much as the PNP might not wish to admit it, the outcome of Sunday’s vote has to be seen in a context beyond a contest of two ambitious members of the party, or Mr Spencer’s immediate antecedent as chairman of the PNP’s Region Five, which covers the south-central parish of Manchester and St Elizabeth further to the west.

Though largely unspoken, it also reverberated with Mr Spencer’s older history, as well as questions about the PNP’s preconditions/criteria for selecting candidates, what these are – assuming they exist – and whether they are being employed as the party chooses who will represent it in the coming municipal and national elections. Another pertinent question is whether the PNP still has an internal integrity commission and whether it, as a matter of course, is required to screen prospective candidates.

HAUNTED BY THE PAST

Kern Spencer was only 28 in 2002 when he was appointed to the Senate by then Prime Minister P.J. Patterson. When Mr Patterson retired four years later, his successor, Portia Simpson Miller, made Mr Spencer a junior minister in the mining and energy ministry under Phillip Paulwell. He was put in charge of the free distribution of four million energy-saving light bulbs that were gifted to Jamaica by Cuba.

In the PNP’s electoral defeat in September 2007, Mr Spencer won the seat for St Elizabeth North East, which, ironically, began the unravelling of his storied rise in politics.

The following year, the new administration claimed that there had been major corruption in the light bulb distribution project. An investigation by the contractor general concluded that Mr Spencer improperly intervened in procurement arrangements and that his personal company, and those of connected parties, were used to manage and/or execute the scheme.

Mr Spencer, his personal assistant, as well as a co-defendant who eventually turned Crown witness, were charged with various corruption and fraud offences involving nearly J$300 million. Mr Spencer was eventually freed of all the charges in March 2014, after a long, meandering trial in a magistrate’s court.

Although he was declared not guilty in a court of law, unlike others who have moved beyond similar clouds, Mr Spencer has not been able to escape the shadow of the so-called Cuban Light Bulb Scandal – not even after his election as chairman of Region Five in 2021.

SCRUTINY OF CANDIDATES

It is what the delegates of St Elizabeth North East instinctively understood, and feared, would dog Mr Spencer in an election campaign – as was foreshadowed by attorney in the corruption trial, former PNP Cabinet minister K.D. Knight.

Mr Knight, who publicly supported Ms Jess in the selection, said of his action: “... In a sense, I am protecting him and so I want you to understand that if you are going to win an election, you can’t open up yourself, your corners must be clean. I say yes to Jess, and I don’t say no to Kern…I say not now.”

That argument clearly did not resonate with Mr Spencer’s ambition, and his party obviously did not believe there was anything to inhibit him being its standard-bearer – whether as a regional representative or election candidate. We can only assume that Mr Spencer, and all other declared candidates, received the imprimatur of the PNP’s integrity commission.

Of course, Mr Spencer, having had his day in court and having been freed of all charges, fully deserves to have his reputation restored. But the actions of the delegates in St Elizabeth North East illustrated that sometimes perceptions are powerful drivers in politics and people’s expectations in governance. Which is why the PNP, which hopes to form the next government, should be transparent about its checklist for candidates, including what scrutiny they face from its integrity commission.

That commission need not name names, but it would help in building public confidence if it provided broad reports of the outcomes of its work, and should the lessons of St Elizabeth North East be, or should have been, applied to other candidate selections.