Shall Patterson and Golding lecture us now?

Backslidden ex-PMs now robed as high priests

Martin Henry

Our out-of-office prime ministers have taken to lecturing us about government. For this column, I am leaving out Edward Seaga and Andrew Holness and taking on the other two living ones, P.J. Patterson and Bruce Golding, who have both recently garnered major public attention for public pronouncements.

Mr Seaga has been gone for a long time, since 1989, and perhaps has the special privileges of advanced old age. From his perch as research fellow at the University of the West Indies, he has produced a whole stream of public-policy articles carried by this newspaper, lecturing government, and written entire books in which he has promoted his own successes and explained away his failures in paternal, professorial fashion.

Mr Holness passed through so fast that he is sometimes overlooked as having been prime minister. And he remains in politics as parliamentarian and leader of the Opposition, positions from which he has both a right and a duty to lecture government and the country.

In the American presidential system, presidents, having served their two terms, ride off into the sunset to establish their presidential library, write memoirs, and do charitable works. Under Westminster, without term limits, an ex-prime minister can well return to the legislature and make other bids for the office. But what happens when they retire from politics? We haven't got a long tradition.

Bustamante retired too old and ill to do anything else except enjoy Bellencita. Hugh Shearer and Michael Manley were remarkably quiet in retirement and didn't even write memoirs. Seaga, Golding (now an honorary distinguished fellow at the UWI), and Patterson have taken to dispensing advice with public policy import in very active public, and in some cases, academic lives.

While the media (but not the irreverent cartoonists!) and certain sectors of the society have granted a respectful hearing, another segment, perhaps, the larger, has ripped into the ex-heads of government basically on the grounds that they have been part of the country's problems and didn't take their own advice when they had opportunity to steer the ship of state.

These, as P.J. would say in lawyerly fashion, are not unreasonable grounds.

Great expectations

There is an additional personal reason to take on Patterson and Golding. They have been two prime ministers for whom I have had the greatest expectation that they would be both willing and able to break with the traditions of their respective parties, transform the crooked system of politics and governance they had inherited, and begin the construction of a better Jamaica.

Mr Patterson, fresh in the office of prime minister, and I talked over the fence between Jamaica House and 2A Devon Road while I served as a United Nations Development Programme project officer working out of the Office of the Prime Minister. Then there were the public columns. We discussed public-sector modernisation and the Citizen's Charter, science and technology in development, and values and attitudes.

But after 14 years in office, Mr Patterson left the system, at its core, largely undisturbed in its brokenness and dysfunctionality.

Mr Golding truncated his own vision and opportunities through his party-centred handling of the Coke-Manatt debacle and was hounded out of office and out of politics.

Mr Patterson has recently pronounced on his pet subject of attitudes and values, which for him is "a subject of absolute importance - and for the nation a matter of life and death". He is warning us that "we are on the extreme edge of the precipice", the headline under which a newspaper carried the text of his speech to the Rotary Club of Spanish Town nearly a full week after its delivery. Mr Golding has been advising on the role of the Church, bank charges, the state of the NHT, the electricity issue, and the homosexual issue in recent pronouncements.

If we are indeed at the extreme edge of a precipice of moral and social decay, Mr Patterson has helped to deliver us there.

Fast-forward 20 years since the 1994 launch of Patterson's Values and Attitudes campaign: "Today," this ex-prime minister says, "There is a growing sense of alienation and greater distrust of leadership in politics, in our legal system, our national institutions, corporate business, the Church. We are at the extreme edge of the precipice. The statistics are irrefutable and all point in the wrong direction."

How did we get there?

On February 25, 1999, I wrote, "The substance of the column which I wrote the week after the National Consultation on Values and Attitudes in February 1994 bears repeating now, exactly five years later and five years no better off ... . While the consultation was a useful starting point, a valuable initiative for mobilisation, the Government will not achieve practical results by preaching change or by abdication, relying upon other sectors to carry the initiative. The Government ... must decisively use what it controls to achieve the overt behavioural results it wants.

"The State controls the legal framework, it controls what is loosely called the 'political culture', and it controls the public service. These are Patterson's levers for decisively influencing values and attitudes. What would happen if a bold Government should forcefully apply the road traffic laws, the night noise law and, generally, the 'enjoyment of property' laws, the indecency laws, and so on, along the line? This simple act of applying the many laws governing social interaction would be like a tonic for values and attitudes.

"Prime Minister Patterson is not a preacher, or moral philosopher, or teacher, or journalist, or creative artist, or entertainer. He is a politician, trained in law, who currently heads the Government of Jamaica. It is the tools of politics and Government which are in his hands for leading a revolution in values and attitudes. A wise man should use what he has to get what he wants."

Lost legacy

Mr Patterson set up the Kerr Commission on Political Tribalism, but did nothing in particular about the trenchant findings and recommendations of the commission. Murders continued to rise during his prime ministership; and the dollar continued its relentless decline - like attitudes and values. He exited, leaving garrisons, the home bases of murder, extortion, and social crassness, still deeply entrenched, and the entire system of 'old politics' essentially intact. The feedback in the blogs to his Rotary Club speech was devastating, ripping into what was largely seen as Pattersonian hypocrisy.

Out of Government and out of politics, Bruce Golding, whose Government was 'distracted' by the Coke-Manatt affair from its own LNG project, now knows how to lower the cost of electricity. He can instruct on how bank charges should be treated.

He preaches to the Church on its role in the politics of 'sustainable human development', advising it to "move beyond the salvation doctrine and use persuasive authority to address some of the serious cultural dysfunctionalities of society", dysfunctionalities which have been left undisturbed and often created by politicians like himself.

While defending Prof Brendan Bain, and like Patterson trumpeting moral values, Golding is "not opposed to the repeal of the buggery provisions in our laws because I don't think that legislation can, or should, try to regulate sexual practices, except in certain circumstances such as in the protection of children. The State has no business barging into any bedroom to molest homosexuals any more than it would fornicators or adulterers." This The Gleaner considers another Golding waffle.

His Government, having itself dipped into the Fund through another door, the ex-prime minister has a formula for this Government to safely and morally 'expropriate' money from the NHT.

It may not be possible, or even desirable, for our ex-prime ministers to retreat into benign silence. But when do their pronouncements cross the line to become unwarranted interference with current public policy? And that nagging question: Why should their pronouncements be taken seriously when they didn't do it when they could? Mr Patterson said in that heavily reported and discussed Rotary Club speech, "Let the new conversation begin."

Martin Henry is a university administrator and public-affairs analyst. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and medhen@gmail.com.