A failure of democracy: The hijacking of a country

Horace Levy, Contributor

The persistence of The Gleaner in calling the two major political parties 'gangs' has grieved some people deeply. Many others are cheering The Gleaner on. Former Minister of Health John Junor is one of those aggrieved. He has made his irritation public and, no doubt, speaks for many party people. I am among those who strongly support the point The Gleaner has made in its editorial series.

That point, as I understand it, is that, notwithstanding the many good things done by the two parties, they have been placing party power and party benefit over sound policy and national welfare. Many people have come only recently to this view as a result of current events. These were, above all, the way the extradition of Christopher Coke and the dual citizenship of several parliamentarians were handled.

To most observers, it is clear that in both matters, party power was the decisive consideration. Any doubt about this in respect of citizenship was trashed by Prime Minister Golding's March 8 statement to the House. He declared that he knew all along that five of his party in the House had dual citizenship but that, in the interest of retaining his majority, he had dealt with the problem, one case at a time.

Golding, in effect, for the sake of party power, deliberately violated the Constitution that embodied Jamaica's values and well-being, and that he had sworn to uphold. And he threw this violation openly and, apparently, without shame or regret, in the face of the nation. With the same violations by its own candidates, the Opposition party was behaving no differently.

Recognition of the fact and seriousness of this failure of the two major parties is to be welcomed. What is probably not sufficiently appreciated, however, is how long-standing the failure has been, or how deep its implications for democracy.

The Political Party

Political parties began to be formed a little over two centuries ago after the American and French revolutions. Their role was to rule on behalf of the people who had overthrown the fiats of king and nobles. They were assigned a twofold task. The first and fundamental task was that of exercising and of promoting democracy and people-centred policies - rule by and for the people.

This democracy, one must understand, is not to be considered a once-and-for-all achievement (though it may have been so regarded at first). With education and technology enabling more and better participation by populations in political decision-making, manifestly the expansion of democracy is an ongoing assignment. It has to be the policy promoted ahead of all others. But this has been a difficult act, given the upper/middle class and white or near-white composition of parties that were supposed to represent mostly lower-income and often black people.

Political parties were assigned as well, by political reality, a second task. Given different views and, therefore, competing parties on what the best policies should be, the parties had the further job (in order to promote their respective positions) of achieving power, winning elections, in other words. This would not be their primary or fundamental goal but the necessary means to it.

This conflicts, of course, with the popular view that parties are there simply to win power. But plainly there is a tension between winning power/elections and offering people-centred policies. Saying bluntly what a party really stands for can often be a sure way to lose an election. So election manifestos are often shallow generalities.

Yet, reasoned persuasion is the one tool natural to democracy. Making election victory the primary goal opens the way, on the other hand, to using other tools. It is, in fact, an option against reasoned persuasion, a choice for one or more of its alternatives. Mainly, these are 1) the use of money to buy votes, 2) leader charisma and loyalty to a leader, 3) manipulation of information through the media, 4) use of intimidation and force, or 5) some combination of these, adding up to a partisanship based overmuch on emotion. There is clearly much more to the power-for-self-and-party preference than just selfishness.

Winning over Reasoning, Power over Policy

The lens of history shows the extensive use in Jamaica of all of these alternatives, especially violence. The point here, though, is their source in giving primacy to election victory. While it may be difficult to prove conclusively that power preference is the ruling motive of political leaders in specific political decisions, indications of its excessive importance can often be detected in their and their party's behaviour in respect of elections and election victory.

A brilliant example of the differing policy/power approaches to an election is presented in 1944, the first election in Jamaica in which all its adults could vote. N.W. Manley, leader of the People's National Party (PNP), declared for socialism. He prescribed that PNP candidates for election be chosen at a parish conference, provided the parish had a minimum of 11 party groups. This was an organisational method that gave importance to membership discussion of policy and ideology. Even after making two exceptions, the party fielded only 19 candidates for the 32 seats available.

For his part, Alexander Bustamante, leader of the Jamaica Labour Party, personally selected 29 candidates on the basis of loyalty to himself and of support for property ownership. Manifestly, from speech and behaviour, according to biographer George Eaton (Alexander Bustamante and Modern Jamaica), his primary goals were winning the election and gaining personal power and, in fact, by a large majority he secured those goals.

The PNP held to its path for a time but, gradually, it, too, came to give primacy to the pursuit of power. Nothing more sharply reveals this than the loss of the group structure within the party. This was a gradual process over the last two decades, but began even earlier as the base of the party, with the formation of garrisons in the 1960s-'70s, moved from working-class and self-employed tradesman to a lumpen, unemployed element. It culminated in the recourse by candidates to paper groups in the course of the presidential struggle within the party in 2006-07. In that event, hundreds, if not thousands, of such groups were registered and determined the outcome of the final election.

The Violence Dimension

I said above that the primacy of election victory over sound policy tends to turn a party towards the use of alternatives to reasoned argument, and that one of these alternatives, which the two major parties began from early to employ, was the use of force and intimidation. If there was ever any doubt about the responsibility of party politics for the violence of partisanship in Jamaica, Amanda Sives (Elections, Violence and the Democratic Process in Jamaica 1944-2007, published last year) has removed it.

Sives traces, step by step, the features of partisan politics in Jamaica over seven decades, focusing on the partisan identity created by this politics and on the changes in this identity. Initially, there was the feature of loyalty to leader, then of violence, as in the Battle of Rose Town, but even more in the ongoing trade-union clashes. Later with the formation of garrison communities, the identity assumed a communal and clientelist character, then was suffused with ideology in the 1970s. Violence stayed, however, from early beginnings an enduring feature of partisan identity, imbedded by the experience itself of violence among garrison residents.

Overt partisan violence has declined over the three decades after the near civil war of the 1980 elections and, among inner-city youth, partisanship itself has declined sharply over the past decade. The violence brought into being by partisan politics has, however, continued.

It is deeply imbedded in social relations, in media sensationalism, in police extrajudicial killings, in party connections with garrisons and criminals, and in legislation allowing longer detention and limiting judicial discretion. All of these foster and perpetuate the continuance of violence. They are all the result of a political failure embodied and reflected in the absence of institutions of people power. With the encouragement of, and support from, civil society, it is only these structures that could keep the parties under some control and bring corrective change to those unable to reform themselves.

Failure of Institutional Democracy

The two institutions where the parties could have and should have been expanding democracy, their historical task, but failed to do so, are local government and the Constitution. The record in local government in Jamaica has been bad, from 1937 until 2007, a 70-year seesaw. What the PNP would promote or institute in one decade - from Jamaica Welfare to community councils to parish development committees - the JLP would weaken or knock down in the next decade. That was until 2007, when the Golding administration did an about-face and officially adopted local government reform. Like its predecessor after 1998, it, too, has dawdled over implementation of the much that needs to be done.

The record in respect of the Constitution is similar. The 1974-75 Throne Speech in Parliament, promising comprehensive reform of the 1962 document was followed by bipartisan discussion in the 1980s and two parliamentary commissions in the early 1990s. Out of these came a Charter of Rights, which took Parliament 17 years to finally ratify in March 2011.

Jamaica is about to celebrate 50 years of Independence, but with a raft of critical issues still constitutionally unsettled - Caribbean Court of Justice, republican status, dual citizenship, entrenchment of local government (entirely omitted from the Constitution, Norman Manley-led, of 1962). Essentially, the parties are not concerned. Party power is their preoccupation. It matters little that Parliament meets weekly only one afternoon into the evening, or that local government elections are postponed three times in three and a half years. And bipartisanship - Carl Stone called it an 'entrapment' - for pork-barrel votes like the Constituency Development Fund (money that should go to parish councils and parish development committees) and for superficial displays of camaraderie is a very handy tool.

The reality, though, cloaked by the belief that democracy flourishes because there are regular national elections and a free press, is the substitution of party power for people power. Democracy, instead of expanding, has been constricted at party behest. Town-hall meetings are offered as a substitute, but carry no institutional weight. In institutional democracy, the country has hardly moved beyond the universal adult suffrage of 1944, a profound failure of democracy. Putting party victory over national well-being, they have failed to carry out their own historic mission. They have, in effect, hijacked the country for their own partisan benefit. In that respect, do they not resemble gangs? Under the coming anti-gang legislation, the police might do well to name them 'gangs of interest'.

Horace Levy is a member of the Peace Management Initiative. Email: feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and halpeace.levy78@gmail.com.