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Portia Simpson Miller, Member of Parliament, St. Andrew South West.Phyllis Thomas, News Editor
The contending parties are in the starting gates. The starter - P. J. Patterson - is on his rostrum, his hands on the lever. Any day now he will fly the gate.
In the line-up are the parties' thoroughbreds. Among them are a large number of women - 31 of them. The odds are on the women to reach the finishing post first in the race for 81 Duke Street - Gordon House, the Jamaican Parliament.
In the 1997 race for the House of Representatives eight women won. One was later disqualified (the court ruled someone else the winner). A three-woman, one-man race later saw an upset and another woman being added to the group, so there are still eight women who are members of the House of Representatives.
They are: Doreen Chen (PNP); Portia Simpson Miller (PNP); Jennifer Edwards (PNP); Alethia Barker (PNP); Sharon Hay-Webster (PNP); Violet Neilson (PNP); Olivia 'Babsy' Grange (JLP) and Shahine Robinson (JLP).
In a hostile environment which is marked by sharp party lines and one in which there is fierce competition for limited resources, the women must deliver the goods. Parliament and Jamaican politics are gender-blind - not gender neutral. There is a difference. They see Members of Parliament - not male Members of Parliament and female Members of Parliament. The door is closed on expressed or implied daintiness.
The so-called glass ceiling is intact in the Jamaican Parlia-ment. It is unbreached. The political representation barely includes women, unlike Mozambique, for example, where up to the year 2000, 30.9 per cent of the political representatives were women. Furthermore, the women parliamentarians here have to work harder to ensure that male exuberance does not elbow them out of representing their constituents.
"We have to fight just as hard for anything that we want in our constituency as our male counterparts... sometimes even harder," said Jennifer Edwards, Member of Parliament for St. Catherine South Western said. "Because, regardless of what we do or say I believe the old school tie is still a very strong phenomenon in our social behaviour."
She adds though, "I don't believe that men set out to be spiteful against women. There is just a stronger networking among the men than there is among the women. There isn't a lot of women who have broken the glass ceiling and therefore there isn't a lot for us to fall back on."
Ms. Edwards, Minister of State in the Ministry of Agriculture, is the first woman to hold that post in Jamaica.
But even with the strong male networking, the few women at Gordon House are seen as serious representatives of their constituencies.
"Everybody is treated as seriously as they make themselves to be," Ms. Edwards says. But she adds, "There is a tendency... and I don't consider it in any negative way...for people to try to be frivolous sometimes. I treat it as friendly and I think people recognise the distance to which they can go in being friendly and they treat you as seriously as you treat yourself."
So, in the evening of another political cycle, what have these women accomplished? What can they hold up as monuments to their success? And why should their constituents put them back in Parliament?
The parish of St. Catherine has a strong representation of women - four of them - and their constituencies border each other. There is Miss Edwards in South Western which borders West Central (Alethia Barker). West Central shares border with Central (Miss Grange) and Central borders on South Central (Sharon Hay-Webster).
The extent to which the parish is better off because of these women is probably debatable. But generally, this can be measured by the degree to which social services, the infrastructure and the life of the ordinary people have been improved.
Like the borders, the women share similar issues which impact on the kind of transformation, if any, that they have made in the constituencies. The common issues, for example, include the absence of good quality water supplies, the perennial bad roads and unemployment.
Sharon Hay-Webster is not too satisfied with youth empowerment in St. Catherine South Central, or the skills- training opportunities available there. But she said that further to a visit to Michigan two years ago, in which she met with hoteliers, a training programme for hotel workers has been started. The programme is done through the Social Development Commission, and HEART, which certifies the participants.
"Everyone who has done it has passed so far and I am happy about it but I would prefer to see more training using community centres. But there is not enough community centres here to use," she said."
Alethia Barker never return calls made to her to participate in this feature but she was heard on The Breakfast Club radio programme talking about such problems as the lack of water and high unemployment.
Miss Edwards would want to have more of the Parish Council roads worked on. For, of the 200 Parish Council roads in her constituency, only 15 have been worked on to- date. And it's not for the want of trying she said; the Parish Council lacks the resources to deal with them.
The echo of complaints about bad roads, poor drainage or no drainage and lack of employment reverberates in Miss Grange's constituency. But her challenges go beyond water and roads. Last week she had to pool her resources with those of the Political Ombudsman, Bishop Herro Blair, her opponents and the police to cool tempers in her constituency. Tempers had soared to a murderous pitch with three persons being killed in four days, and another injured. PNP and JLP supporters were fighting over the placement of party flags in the Spanish Town area of the constituency.
Last year, Miss Grange had to shrug off what seemed to be an insider challenge which ended with the leadership of the party giving her its full support. Factions in the constituency including three JLP councillors were antagonistic toward her and one councillor went public with his desire to see her out of the constituency.
But the women parliamentarians are all proud as they showcase several projects as monuments of their success in their constituencies.
For Miss Edwards it is education and water.
"I have a very strong belief in education and in the need for it. It was the No. 1 priority in the Constituency Development Plan. We have succeeded in having some new schools built in the constituency and we have been upgrading a number of other educational facilities.
"There have been areas that have been without water for a tremendously long time and some of them we have got the service in. Some we are still struggling with." She said there was disappointment when they did not succeed but, "I think we have to stay close to the people and say to them 'We haven't given up. We will continue to fight. We have come this far with it and we believe we will succeed in delivering the service.'"
Miss Grange: "I have been very vocal in Parliament in representing the constituency. That sensitised the Government and the public to the conditions there."
In her constituency several projects have been implemented. They include the refurbishing of the Homestead Community Centre which was vandalised and abandoned for years. Also, there are 22 projects under Lift-Up Jamaica programme which have been approved and are being implemented.
Sharon Hay-Webster's success is also in education and it is in youth development as well. Furthermore, there is the maintenance programme whereby every three months the verges, culverts and drains are cleared in a constituency which is known for its susceptibility to flooding.
There is the back-to-basics programme which aims at improving parent-child relationships, youth-skills development and remedial education. A success story is in the Watson Grove Basic School between Cedar Grove and Christian Meadows in Gregory Park which used to operate on a veranda but which has grown to the extent of doubling the size of its population and even operating a canteen.
"There are a number of significant developments taking place within the constituency because of the structures that my administration has put in place to facilitate development," she said.
However, while the four women MPs share borders and similar issues they have not come together to work out any common strategy to address problems which cut across those political boundaries. The closest they have come to that is the understanding between Miss Edwards and Miss Grange to get the private sector involved in developmental projects along the Old Harbour Road.
"We - Miss Grange and I - have discussed meeting together with private sector groups along there (Old Harbour Road) so as to be able to put in that kind of development and that is something that we are committed to," Miss Edwards said.
St. Catherine is better off for having them as representatives. Miss Edwards, a former Mayor of Spanish Town, spoke for her colleagues.
"South West St. Catherine has benefited because of the consistency of the representation made. In West Central I believe Miss Barker has done a tremendous job in terms of getting into that constituency, services which were not previously there...And I know that the issue of participation that Miss Webster has brought to her constituency, I don't know that any of us has been able to put together that kind of interaction with civil society, that she has been able to."
One of the female MPs outside of St. Catherine is new-comer Shahine Robinson, who in March 2001 disrupted the equilibrium of the People's National Party, infiltrating its St. Ann North East stronghold and taking the seat.
After a year and a half in the constituency she feels her bold and successful challenge is paying off in what she has accomplished so far. She lists them: repairing the road in Great Pond; bringing water supply to Warrick Mount; extending rural electrification to Edge Hill Road in St. Ann's Bay; repairing the Steer Town Basic School, the St. Ann's Bay Infant and the Pineapple Place Basic school as well as building a postal agency in Exchange.
The 26 years in which Portia Simpson Miller has been Member of Parliament and her position in the Cabinet make her senior to the other women parliamentarians. She is Minister of Tourism and Sport and once held the Ministry of Labour, Sport and Welfare portfolio.
As Labour Minister, several tricky industrial disputes were resolved under her watch, some of which called for marathon sittings with the disgruntled parties.
As minister with responsibility for women she has been vocal in her call for women's unpaid work to be represented in national statistics and be made visible and valuable. She has opposed sexual harassment, rape and murder of women.
Now she occupies a ministry which oversees the sector bringing in the most foreign exchange yet, a ministry which many believe is under-funded. Lately, the Jamaica Tourist Board (JTB) and the ministry have come in for some savaging by some tourism interests who charge that there is inefficiency in their operations.
Mrs. Simpson Miller has her hands full easing off the critics and lately, investigating allegations of mismanagement at the JTB office.
Then there are Trelawny's South's Doreen Chen who did not reply to our request for an interview, and Violet Neilson, Member of Parliament for St. James East Central and Speaker of the House of Representatives. At Gordon House she has had her hands full trying to get her colleagues to be punctual. The lateness of Parliamentarians for sittings of the House and its various committees has grown progressively worse in recent times, news reports say.
Eight strong women are in Parliament. Strangely there is no caucus of women. This is being blamed on their disparate and demanding schedules. Yet, these eight women recognise the need for the caucus. At the same time, they feel that the Jamaican society is not prepared to deal with their individual concerns.
The next Parliament should have a caucus of women though. That's what the women say.
