For the last eight years Phillips has been increasingly in the public eye, as the Member of Parliament for East Central St. Andrew since April 1994, Minister of Health 1995-1998, Minister of Transport and Works 1998 until his appointment in 2002 as Minister of National Security. - File Life in the US and entry into J'can politics
AS A consequence of his Masters work, Peter Phillips was offered the Ford Foundation Scholarship and went to Princeton in 1977. "My wife and children didn't go, though I continued to support them," he told me.
"I had not formally separated but emotionally and psychologically I was on a different trajectory, embarked upon academic pursuits. I guess that translated itself into marital divorce in the early '80s, but in effect the estrangement had been from '76. By the time I went to study at Princeton, I had taken a conscious decision to leave Twelve Tribes."
ONCE A RASTAFARIAN
"Yes, the man who is today Jamaica's Minister of National Security was once a Rastafarian with locks, which he trimmed when he left to pursue his doctoral studies in the United States. During our interview he spoke often of his father, Aubrey Phillips, who had been Professor of Education at UWI and I thought how wise the professor had been to have given his son the space to explore various lifestyles and philosophies, knowing that one day Peter's grounding in education, both formal and independent, would give him the confidence to find his own career path.
Phillips left the Twelve Tribes because: "I thought there was a disjuncture between a regard for learning, research, etc. and the kind of religious-based analyses that were typical there." But Princeton didn't fill the bill either. "I had come from Jamaica with a number of academic and intellectual questions I wanted answered and they weren't being answered. By the end of the
first semester I indicated to
the Ford Foundation and to Princeton that I wanted to study with Emmanuel Wallerstein at State University of New York (SUNY), Binghamton, which was one of the better decisions I've made in life because of the quality of intellectual endeavours. Wallerstein had been at Colombia University, had gone to Montreal, and, along with Terry Hopkins, who was also a part of that Colombia group, had established a department at SUNY Binghamton which was on the cutting edge then, and still now, of academic endeavour in the United States in World Systems Studies. My focus was on the entire Caribbean and US/Caribbean relations. I looked at the Spanish Caribbean as
well as the English-speaking Caribbean expecting that there was a communality of the transformation of the society in each of these countries, based upon the systemic transformations in the world system."
RESPONDING WITH RHETORIC
Remember this man has been a Rastafarian and an academic before becoming a politician so he can, with ease, 'reason', philosophise or respond with rhetoric using words that some of us might find a bit baffling. For instance, the title of his doctoral dissertation
was: "US/Caribbean Relations: Cycles of Hegemony and Rivalry in the Caribbean."
'Hegemony' simply means:
leadership or predominant influence exercised by one state over others, as in a confederation or simply
leadership, predominance. Phillips' time as first a political activist at UWI, his immersion in Rastafarianism and then his period of academic interaction with scholars in the United States meant to him personally, a discovery that he expresses in this way:
"The fact of our equality as part of the human race was not something amenable to proof. In fact, it was not something that was even amenable to question. It was just a self-evident truth. Studying in the United States in what was one of the premiere, cutting-edge institutions of US academia, encountering people from all over the world, where there was no doubt whatever, not only of your own capabilities as an academic but that these questions are viewed by everyone else as being self-evident truths: that people of African origin were people and it just didn't brook any need for questioning and you needed to move on. I understood the historical forces that had shaped different societies. I think, if I may go on, that the realisation of the Caribbean as a distinct culture and, that we as a Caribbean people had developed our own civilisation, a civilisation which had made a contribution to world civilisation in the same respects as the other cultural zones, was something that came forcibly to my attention in these periods of study. In effect, there was a challenge to enable us as a zone which had been present at the birth of the modern world, that we had a particular role, a particular capability in the world and we needed to realise this -- things that I think were evident to me before, but I got more of an intellectual underpinning in my endeavours in the United States and elsewhere. I developed a very great self-confidence in my own personal capabilities. That came home to me in that period."
While in the United States from 1977 through 1981, Phillips took the advantage to travel within the country, largely in the South, Atlanta, and
the whole East Coast, to Amherst and the University of Massachusetts as well as New York where he had a sustained involvement with the PNPYO elements in New York City. He notes that he wasn't in Jamaica for the 1980 election but came back during the summers and stayed in touch with UWI so that when UWI called and offered him the job that Paul Robertson had held, Phillips returned in 1981 as an assistant lecturer in the Department of Government and advanced through the UWI community while becoming fully involved in PNP politics.
ELECTION DEFEAT
When I asked how he had responded to Michael Manley's massive election defeat and his reaction to what had happened to the economy of the country he answered: "My view at that time would have been that Michael and the PNP had lost but his basic political project was intact in so far as it involved building an economy that could answer to the needs of Jamaicans." When asked for clarification of how leaving the economy in shambles was beneficial to the needs of Jamaicans, Phillips replied: "By that, I mean that benefits that were to flow, needed to be distributed more equitably, a claim articulated and established definitively by Michael Manley who irrevocably ruptured the underpinnings of plantation economy." Twenty or 30 years later, the problem now he said is "How do we give substance to the claims of citizenship that are being expressed by the majority? Contemporary politics has reinforced the structures of personal dependency inherited from plantation society and has not sufficiently articulated a doctrine of personal responsibility for the population as a whole." In other words, how do we now teach personal social responsibility to the masses?
He says: "Between '77 and '81 I'd essentially become a political economist and was focused on broad global processes and structures in which Jamaica was embedded." When he returned home in 1981 he taught at UWI and: "I was largely involved in the People's National Party's endeavours. I had become a member of the Executive from about '83/84. I was Chairman of the PNP Political Education Commission and was involved in other commissions of the party: Economy and Production, Political Education, International Affairs, and the like. I had come back to Jamaica a so-called ABD, all but dissertation. My father at that point died in '84 when I had still to finish my last bits of research and do my writing. I made a commitment to him on his deathbed that I was going to finish this writing. I applied and got a Fullbright Scholarship and went up for a year and basically finished my writing. I went back to Binghamton for six months and to the University of Florida at Gainesville, which has a great Caribbean library, which I used to finish my writing, particularly on those sections of my dissertation that involved the Spanish Caribbean. I returned about '85/86 and lectured in both the Dept of Government and the Consortium Graduate School where Norman Girvan was head."
Circa 1983/84 he'd met Sandra Minott who was working at UWI in the job he had earlier held as administrative assistant to the Faculty of Arts. Says Phillips: "We developed an association about the same time my father was ill and died of cancer. We had become very close, developed that association and affection then." She was a dancer with the National Dance Theatre of Jamaica and has since gone on to become an attorney with Myers, Fletcher and Gordon. They married in 1987 and have two children: Luke, 10, and Jacob, 8.
RUNNING A FARM
Asked if he'd ever run a business of any kind, Phillips replied: "I've always been an academic. I ventured into coffee farming towards the end of the '80s for a bit. My father had left me a bequest. I bought a farm and ran it for a few years but I had to make a choice. Either I was going to be an academic or a governmental activist or I was going to do my farm. I tried as best as I could and could not find time to spend administering the business. My eldest son Michael (from his first marriage) helped and had done a lot but at some point in life youngsters have to venture out into their own life. So I sold it. You could not run a farm on the basis of visiting it once every six months or four months or whatever."
From 1989 Phillips served as Senator and Minister Without Portfolio in the Office of the Prime Minister, basically managing what was the Policy Review Unit. Of that period he feels that: "We did a lot of positive things, developed things such as the Greater Portmore Project, the MIDA project (Micro Investment Development Agency) and looked at other programmes in relation to privatisation of interests, including the liberalisation of the currency."
For the last eight years Phillips has been increasingly in the public eye, as the Member of Parliament for East Central St. Andrew since April 1994, Minister of Health 1995-1998, Minister of Transport and Works 1998 until his appointment in 2002 as Minister of National Security. When asked which of the Ministry posts he has enjoyed the most, he said: "Transport and Works. It provides an opportunity to recognise the tangible results of one's efforts in terms of better transport and better road facilities." What about the number of buses that are broken down? "I don't know the exact numbers," he said, "but there is a system operating which is still alive. You could deal with whatever is needed. I feel some contentment in having been able to construct institutional arrangements that facilitate the long-term development of the country and the Road Maintenance Programme is one area. We passed the legislation when I was Minister, if not, shortly after. Funds are going into it and there is certainly a sustained effort now to deal with the maintenance of roads, which was the objective of the fund."
In conclusion: His Philosophy and Responses to Specific Questions
