MANLEY AND SEAGA, THE PNP AND THE JLP - Putting people first

Martin Henry, Contributor

LAST TUESDAY evening, Delano Franklyn, the compiler and editor, and the Michael Manley Foundation, of which Franklyn is current chairman, launched the book, Michael Manley: Putting People First, very fittingly at the University of the West Indies, Mona.

From the invitation, I formed the impression that the book would be a compilation of Manley's utterances on the matter of putting people first. Instead it turned out to be a compilation of 10 annual Michael Manley Lectures delivered between 2003 and 2012.

The publication, the editor said, was intended to fulfil three purposes. The first was to provide factual information in the debates about the controversial Mr Manley and to correct distortions, some of them deliberate. The second was to help satisfy the hunger among the youth for information about our national leaders. Some of these youth have an interest in the political process and will need to decide which group to join. And, thirdly, the book is a contribution to the celebrations of the 75th anniversary of the People's National Party which was Michael Manley's vehicle for putting his ideas to work as the second president of the party.

Manley distortions

The distortions about Michael Manley, of course, have gone in both directions. And how Peolple's National Party PNP/Manley loyalists and/or activists like Peter Phillips, Lloyd Goodleigh, Carlton Davis, Barbara Gloudon, and Anthony Bogues, not to mention child Rachel, can be relied upon, as lecturers, to undistort Manley is a bit of an intellectual challenge to those interested in neutral fairness and balance. Which is not to say their interpretations of Manley do not have critical value. But those interpretations themselves will require counter-balancing and critical assessment.

Those of us who lived under Manley and his predecessors and successors in national leadership will have our own lived experience and our own interpretations of those experiences. The youth need a fair and balanced account of history and undoubtedly, this book about Manley will make a contribution as raw material to be rubbed against other raw material, rather than as any definitive and final statement of "truth". Chairman of the book launch, the urbane Burchell Whiteman, called for a national conversation based on facts and respect.

Mr Manley's PNP celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, having being founded on September 13, 1938. Mr Seaga's Jamaica Labour Party celebrates its 70th anniversary this year, having been founded on July 8, 1943. Mr Seaga delivered the keynote address at the JLP's 70th Anniversary function at Pegasus hotel on July 8, an important address outlining his version of the political history of the country since the 1930s as he has previously done in his autobiographical books and in his newspaper column. We are grateful to the print medium which extensively carried that speech, as JLP-biased as it might be, giving it accessibility and permanence as part of the raw material of our history through the eyes of someone who made much of that history.

Seaga Development Plan

There is another Seaga product which I have referred to many times in this column, The Five-Year Independence Development Plan, 1963-1968, which Edward Seaga as minister of development and welfare presented to the House of Representatives on July 24, 1963. Mr Seaga was not, of course, sole architect of the plan. As John Maxwell never failed to remind me whenever I wrote about the Plan and gave Mr Seaga and the JLP credit, the plan had been substantially developed by Norman Manley's PNP Government in preparation for Independence and was borrowed without credit/'stolen' by the JLP and Mr Seaga.

This Maxwellian account actually serves my purpose well today. The Five-Year Independence Development Plan, 1963-1968, grounded in a solid historical review of injustice, deprivation and oppression for the majority of the Jamaican people, provided a comprehensive situation analysis of the situation at the dawn of Independence and a pragmatic action plan for change. Its bipartisan genesis makes it all the more important. There was development consensus at the time of Independence.

By the middle of the 1960s, partisan tribalism and political violence were starting to derail any hope of bipartisan collaboration for national development. The independent country's first state of emergency was imposed upon Mr Seaga's own constituency of Western Kingston after violent clashes between JLP and PNP supporters there in the opening salvos of garrisonisation.

Mr Manley assumed the leadership of the PNP from his father in 1969, and Mr Seaga became leader of the JLP in 1974. A more distant and dispassionate rendition of history will confirm my carefully considered view that the 18 years between 1974 and 1992 when Mr Manley retired from politics, the joint Manley/Seaga years of political leadership, were the defining years for the frustrating of the development expectations of the country coming into Independence. They were the years of the greatest political tensions, tribalism and violence, economic setbacks, and social decay.
We can proceed to assess and ascribe weights of
responsibility.

Interestingly, the JLP's Pearnel
Charles, one of the detainees in the 1976 state of emergency, and who
has written his own book about his experience, was at the book
launch.

There is hardly any question that Michael
Manley had a good heart and a great heart. And when international reach
and impact are factored in, Michael Manley is easily among the top 10
greatest Jamaicans ever.

As keynote speaker, the Rt
Rev Dr Robert Thompson, Anglican Suffragan Bishop of Kingston, put it at
the book launch whatever were his mistakes, Manley had a passion for
social justice which was the hallmark of his philosophy and politics.
His vision was for transforming post-colonial society into an equitable
and just society, "putting people first", securing dignity for all. But
all of this the bipartisan Five-Year Independence Development
Plan, 1963-1968, promised. Manley, like his counterpart,
contributed to a politics which substantially frustrated the intentions
articulated in that plan and in his own articulation of a vision for
society. His mistakes must not be glossed over but must be frankly
assessed.

The keynote speaker reminded the audience
that Michael Manley was a democratic socialist all his life who made
political adjustments for meeting the exigencies of elections. His
Government publicly declared for democratic socialism in 1974. The
economy took a battering with every index going negative. Scarcity was
the order of the day. In his homily at the end of his speech, Father
Thompson pontificated against hoarding, not recognizing it as a rational
economic and social response to scarcity and
uncertainty.

Shortages in socialist
Venezuela

In the Bolivarian socialist Venezuelan state
created by the late Hugo Chavez, and remarkably similar to the Manley
experiment with a democratic socialist government featuring price
controls and rationing, today there are rampant shortages including
shortage of toilet paper, and, Father Thompson might be interested to
hear, of wine for the Eucharist. And the standard excuse that an enemy
has done this against the revolution is trotted
out.

In the 1970s the dollar sharply deteriorated, the
net international reserves vanished into negative, and we were forced
into the first borrowing relationship with the International Monetary
Fund, a spectre which remains with us until today.

We
entered into sharply polarised international relationships, with a
growing friendship with Cuba at the cost of growing tensions with the
United States. Ironically, in a different age, both the US ambassador
and the Cuban ambassador, who is the current Dean of the Diplomatic
Corps, were honoured guests at the book launch.

In a
world of declining socialism, we are now handling much better and more
discreetly our relationships with Venezuela and Cuba on the one hand and
the United States on the other. One of Mr Manley's miscalculations of
the 1970s, which he himself later frankly admitted was the
under-estimation of the brutal unsentimentality of diplomacy and
international relations. A mistake which is now being perpetuated in
CARICOM relations.

Let the numbers
speak

When we let the numbers speak without political
interference, there is no doubt whatsoever that the 1980s moderately
reversed or at least stabilised the decline of the 1970s in the
fundamental economic indices. One critical exception was the continued
growth of the debt stock.

The 1970s was an interesting
time for community development about which Barbara Gloudon lectured in
2005. Except for the halcyon years of Jamaica Welfare which Michael's
father Norman founded with a banana money grant from the United Fruit
Company in 1937, the 1970s were the peak of national engagement around
community development and of voluntarism. The Manley brainchild, the
National Housing Trust, (NHT) came on stream in 1976 as an innovative
institutional answer to providing housing "solutions". The Michael
Manley Foundationa makes an annual award on Emancipation Day for
community self-reliance.

The Five-Year
Independence Development Plan, 1963-1968, had estimated a
"need for some 165,000 units over the next decade to satisfy the demand
for new houses" to replace sub-standard buildings and to meet the needs
of a growing population. The NHT, as everybody knows, never rose to that
challenge.

But the '70s were also the peak decade of
communal political warfare and garrisonisation, with the Manley-led PNP
constructing more than the JLP, 5:1. The physical and social degradation
of many communities followed, a state from which we are yet to recover.
The devastation of the inner cities and the entrenchment and
normalisation of crime in them is an important negative legacy of the
Manley/Seaga years.

Having said all that, assembling a
decade of the Michael Manley Lectures between two covers provides a
rich resource for analysing our nation's past and current condition from
which we can learn valuable lessons for the future if we have ears to
hear, to borrow biblical language. Other lecturers whose texts are
printed in the book include: Kenny Anthony, George Alleyne, and Stephen
Vascianne. Putting people first has been in too many instances replaced
by putting party first.

Martin Henry is a
communications consultant. Send comments to
columns@gleanerjm.com