Malahoo Forte: I work without fanfare - Second-time MP says unconventional approach to politics works for her, constituents
Published:Sunday | September 13, 2020 | 12:08 AM
No cameras and no handouts may have given those on the outside of St James West Central the impression that she was disconnected from the constituents, doing little and was on her way to being a one-term member of parliament, Marlene Malahoo Forte has said.
However, the win over a week ago in the general election, in which she increased her margin from 2016 to send the home-grown lecturer Dr Andre Haughton back to the classroom, she argued, should be enough to silence her doubters.
“My style is to do the work without fanfare,” she told The Sunday Gleaner, as she reflected on her duties for the next five years in a constituency starkly representative of Jamaica – a mix of bustling, well-to-do areas like Freeport coexisting with some violence-plagued and poverty-stricken ones.
“People are used to politicians operating with a lot of fluff. I’m taking time quietly to understand the needs of the people and do my best to respond to those needs insofar as the Government has a duty to address them,” she said.
“I didn’t do a lot of PR (public relations) and that was very deliberate, but I spent the time on the ground with the people and I never left the seat – never – from the time I was elected.”
Based on preliminary figures, Malahoo Forte polled 6,123 votes to Haughton’s 4,414 to secure her second term with 1,709-vote margin – an increase of 448 votes over margin from 2016.
Roaming the streets, filtering out the people’s concerns and reiterating achievements formed core of the re-election strategy.
Sure, there must have been some other sophisticated approach to securing the votes, but Malahoo Forte, a lawyer by training, would not give details.
Mum On Strategy
“I’m not disclosing my strategy,” she said, noting, “it worked 100 per cent and sometimes it was counter to what my team thought or would have accepted,” she said. “A lot of persons struggle with my approach to politics because though they say it’s very different from everybody else – whether that is so or not, I don’t know – I only do things how I know to do it.”
That admission from the attorney general is noteworthy in light of the views from some senior JLP organisers, who, in the lead-up to the polls, expressed frustrations with her campaign.
“She’s just lucky the Government helped out that seat with the ZOSO (zone of special operations) and the organisation of the only councillor down there,” said a key functionary central to the party’s election machinery.
The JLP councillor for the Spring Garden division, Dwight Crawford, has been credited for his ground game, which has reportedly been pivotal in maintaining the party’s structures in the constituency, and crucially, to getting out the votes on election day.
“I’m not saying she would have lost,” the official said, “I’m saying just how much better it could have been if some things were done differently by the MP.”
A Gleaner-commissioned Don Anderson poll gave Malahoo Forte a 13-percentage point lead over Haughton just days before the election.
ZOSO was Key
In his analysis, Anderson noted that the ZOSO – a crime-fighting tool introduced in the last term to rid communities of gangs and saturate the area with state social resources to prevent renesting of criminals – was key.
The first ZOSO was declared in 2017 in the Mount Salem area, a PNP stronghold and one of the three divisions that make up to constituency. The others are Granville and the JLP’s bastion of Spring Garden.
Dismissing the criticism as “noise”, the former judge said the ZOSO was a “deliberate action, not only by me but by the Government”.
“We didn’t look at it as whether it was PNP or JLP area. I looked at it in terms of what needed to be done to bring real improvement to the lives of the people.”
Although hailing the ZOSO as one of her key ‘achievements’ of the last term, campaign manager Dale Delapenha said arguments that the state resources were being used to consolidate a seat the PNP previously held does not hold much sway.
“When pundits would have said, ‘Use that in maybe a stronghold of your constituency to shore up support’, our member of parliament rejected that,” he said. “She made it clear she didn’t stand for partisan representation and she took it into one of the few pockets in the constituency that has traditionally supported the PNP.”
The impact of the work, mainly carried out by entities such as Jamaica Social Investment Fund and the Social Development Commission, has been “significant”, he said.
“If you were to drive through that area of Mount Salem before, it would have appeared to be shanty town with zinc fences,” said the managing director of Delapenha’s Funeral Home, who has worked on campaigns for other senior party figures, including Dr Horace Chang, JLP general secretary; and Edmund Bartlett.
The former councillor, however, said the campaign team felt “disrespected” the constituency was classified as “marginal”.
“You can’t win a constituency by 1,200 votes and consider it a marginal seat,” he said making reference to the 2016 election in which the PNP’s incumbent, Sharon Ffolkes-Abrahams, was defeated, as JLP reclaimed the seat that was established in 1976.
With the September 3 win, the JLP has now won five of the 10 contested polls in the constituency, four of which came since 2002, with Clive Mullings leading the resurgence. He served for two terms before losing to Ffolkes-Abrahams.
For her second term, infrastructure, as it did for the last one, will dominate the agenda.
“I’m very concerned about the extent of the poor living conditions of many constituents and a lot of the requests we get on the social side is to help them to improve their housing stock,” Malahoo Forte shared.
“I’m very concerned about community amenities; concerned about road infrastructure; the availability of water in homes; family life, generally; things for the young people, but for the older people too.”