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Left to right: Manley and SeagaBernard Headley, Contributor
Of the six heads of Government who have led Jamaica since Independence, the most widely known is inarguably the populist Michael Manley of the People's National Party (PNP).
Mr. Manley was notorious during the heyday of his 1970s time in power for his fiery rhetoric and impetuous Afro-centric internationalism. He is certainly the most written about, having himself left behind a significant body of his own writings.
However, when the complete story about Jamaica's immediate post-Independence national political leaders is written, of surprising extraordinary importance might well be the less well-known and perhaps less regarded leader of the Jamaica Labour Party, Edward Seaga. The intentionally less-than-charitable will undoubtedly argue that that legacy has been Mr. Seaga's strong-arm influence in the shaping of a certain kind of national political discourse and political culture.
A more balanced assessment would also see him, though, as the political officeholder (first as Minister of Government then later as Prime Minister) who did the most to create the kind of national institutions that have sought to promote and sustain the cause of "indigenisation," an essentiality in the building of the nation. It's an assessment that others have before suggested: for example, the widely respected political analyst and pollster Carl Stone and, in their writings, two University of the West Indies vice chancellors, the eminent Rex Nettleford and the late great Philip Sherlock, no diehard JLP "shottas" any of them.
It was Eddie Seaga, not Norman Manley before him or Mr. Manley's blustery journalist-labour activist son, who advanced the cause of, and eventually succeeded at, bringing back to his native Jamaica for heroic interment Marcus Garvey's remains.
Irony
But there's a poignant irony to Mr. Seaga's leadership of his country. Its people seemed only to have turned to him as national leader (once really) when they saw their nation in dire crisis, in a state of moral turmoil, economic collapse, or worse. They literally turned to him for "deliverance."
Then, just as blithely, they cast him aside when times got better, and consistently rejected his bid to lead when things seemed fairly normal. A national majority has never actually voted for him, nor for the political party he's led for a generation, out of unmixed preference for him - for his style, charisma, charm or passion. They voted convincingly for him once before mostly because they'd grown to hate, if only for a season, the living daylights out of that other guy, a "leadah" whom they'd at one time adored. And, as everyone knows, to take liberties with the poet William Congreve, "Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a (voter) scorned."
After years of leading a fractious JLP, seen at various times ready to either implode or self-destruct, and having lost in local elections and three successive national contests, the chattering class had dismissed Mr. Seaga as a political "has been," a man whose time has ended.
Gleaner psychic Safa advised at the start of the year that he should "just go home and rest or go to St. Mary." He went instead to North East St. Ann. From the prism of that political constituency, the nation once again sees itself in deep trouble, and once again appears ready to turn to Mr. Seaga for deliverance. He seems never before more ready.
North East St. Ann was the JLP forces' Ground Zero. But it really should've been a pushover, a piece of cake for the PNP. Nothing seemed to have worked for them there: not their 2 a.m. pork-belly projects, their implied threats of dispossession, or the last-minute race card irresponsibly tossed over the wall by their own light-skinned man of the cloth.
The results of the North East St Ann contest may now very well decide how soon Mr. Seaga's resurrection and the second coming of deliverance. In North East St. Ann Mr. Seaga and the JLP managed successfully to intertwine local issues of housing and disputes over "squatter" settlements with a bigger national picture of joblessness, unemployment and general sense of hopelessness. The constituency thus reflects, they contended, the state of all sorry Jamaica in microcosm: a nation lurching towards the brink, needing to be rescued, delivered, saved.
I've been following Mr. Seaga around a bit these past several weeks. I'm trying to get to know for the history books the man behind the dark glasses, a onetime staple that'd given rise to much psycho babble: either it was a prop or a depiction of something dark and troublingly mysterious in his personae, if not within his very soul. For the event in North East St. Ann I saw him plunge himself into it with unmatched zeal. He brought into the contest the full measure of his party's organisation, including hefty financial resources, the first time they'd been able to do so, he says, since 1989.
He was in it with youthful energy, unbound vigour, total commitment and a dynamo of a candidate, Shahine Robinson, a "little pepper," he called her out there on the campaign trail. He sprightly manoeuvred the intricate terrain leading to the hovels where his staunchest supporters lived, literally bouncing over rocks and ravines up to a place sitting high above heartland PNP territory. Its residents have proudly dubbed the place "Little Tivoli".
Despite being two decades his junior and trail boots worn expressly for the purpose, I was unable to keep up with him, dressed as he was in slippery, flat leather soles. A man infinitely at ease and at one with himself, Mr. Seaga is. He is keenly logical if at times still too wedded to his macroeconomic analyses. Yet, his daughter says, contrary to what everyone else thinks, he does listen and he will take advice.
He's not the autocrat - at least not in the same way - he could be accused of being say 10 years ago, insiders say. But then that's part of the paradox that is his essence: Why hasn't he moved decisively - as he's done frequently in the past - at settling lingering contentiousness in the party, his detractors have demanded.
He moves easily, effortlessly among the people from below. He is intensely interested in the details of the lives and future careers of the players on his community football and basketball teams. He knows without hesitating the first names of everyone of his many Tivoli godchildren. He listens closely, patiently, to whatever it is they are individually telling him, often in private conversation. Not once have I ever seen him glance at his watch while listening to someone.
There's no apparent phoniness in his unaffected immersion into the physical space and arms of people who look not at all like him.
He is without political peer in the quiet yet penetrating way he connects with people, with his crowd. He doesn't "play" for the cameras; there were no cameras up at "Little Tivoli". Should Seaga and the JLP go on to win the next general election, their biggest challenge will indeed be to transform "connections" to the people into something far more grand and noble than most of them being bump-and-grind cheerleaders wedded to a system of patronage. If any political leader in Jamaica today can pull off that kind of transformation, I believe Edward Seaga can. It would be his greatest legacy.
Bernard Headley is visiting professor, Faculty of Social Science, University of the West Indies, Mona. He is currently doing research for a book on JLP and Opposition Leader Edward Seaga.
