C. Roy ReynoldsTHE TRUTH of the old Jamaican adage: 'weh noh ded noh bury', was well demonstrated by the results of the North East St. Ann by-election last Thursday. But even as it did so it also provided clear reason for a funeral.
Mr. Seaga and his perhaps not so merry men, should feel heartened by the results which permitted their candidate to now move into Gordon House, a rare success for a party which seemed to have made electoral defeat a way of life for a long time. As they are wont to say in American sports circles: 'it was not very pretty, but a win is a win'.
In spite of the traditional advantage that parties in power take unto themselves by virtue of their control over 'things' the JLP had the edge in this one, all things considered. This derived mainly from the circumstances under which the vacancy occurred. Danny Melville did not just resign the seat. He did so with a most sweeping condemnation of his party. And to use another Jamaican saying: 'if fish cum fram riva battam an tell yuh sey alligata dung deh, believe him'.
Melville's assertions were backed up by the sustained drum roll from much of the media for a long time. So whether or not it was really so, perception became the reality. And under the circumstances it was not hard to predict the result that obtained.
I don't know how it figured in the results but there were other signs as well that the PNP was panicking. Nowhere was that more obvious than in its reaction to the recent nude wedding affair. To have rushed to resurrect a morality law from over 70 years ago, inflate the fine attached by one million per cent seemed to have had little to do with reality and all to do with placating voting elements of backwardness, obviously a desperate and cynical move, and too cute to be effective.
Whether the JLP can translate its victory in St. Ann into a national mandate is another story. It still has much work to do and business to put in order to hurdle this one. But at least it seems assured that in the next election the margins of winning will be much narrower than they have been since 1980. This will assure that whoever wins will not have things their own way, and whoever loses will retain sufficient stakes in how they approach opposition to steer them clear of irresponsibility and frivolousness. That to me is the real significance of last week's outing.
So yes, the JLP has managed a resurrection, but it has to go further and shed its funeral suit. The mummy has risen but it still has layers of wrapping to cast off. How it succeeds in this regard will largely determine if it stays resurrected or be re-entombed.
Not so nebulous is the fate of the NDM. I don't think many people expected it to win, but with such a vibrant candidate it did so poorly that its demise is now just a matter of formality. In its latest fiasco it never succeeded, or even tried, to present anything new and different, as it had promised. It relied on the same message as its JLP parent. As far as I saw it made no effort to distinguish itself from the JLP. So obviously the people of St. Ann concluded that it made no sense to vote for the second eleven when the first eleven is in the competition. The only alternative explanation for what happened is if the NDM had made a private treaty with the JLP, which would have been a betrayal of its candidate.
The NDM has now demonstrated clearly that it had no heart for the real task it had assumed. It was a political tin man! When it decided to split from the JLP had it been resolute its first task would have been to discredit the JLP. Only a mortally wounded JLP could have bolstered its cause. Its main challenge to the entrenched PNP should have awaited the flexing of its wings. And the JLP in its paranoid mode presented an attractive target. Instead it remained close to that party even to the extent of sharing platform on the spurious issue of electoral reform, when that clearly was not the main obstacle for either of the parties.
Then it shot itself in the foot when presented with the great opportunity in the last Local Government elections. The withdrawal officially of the JLP from the competition left the field clear for the NDM to move with dispatch to secure several seats on the councils thus giving it a toehold in elected politics. Instead it declined to do so on the flimsy pretext of electoral reform.
So, as I said before, having muffed all its opportunities the NDM is now merely awaiting the arrival of a cleric to give it a decent funeral.
Finally, let me say a word about electoral reform. We are all aware of the fiasco in Florida in the last Presidential elections. Well just a few days ago I heard a high US official say in response to their efforts at electoral reform that a piece of pencil and paper remained the best method of ensuring the best results.
C. Roy Reynolds is a freelance journalist.
