Ian Boyne A PARTY WHICH has been elected for the fourth consecutive term in an economy which is not showing spectacular economic growth and a society rocked by increasing and seemingly intractable levels of violence and social and moral decay is not a party with time on its side.
The biggest issue facing this conference was not the vice-presidential elections yesterday, though that got the media hype and excited verandah and cocktail circuit
gossip.
The biggest issue facing the 65th conference of the People's National Party (PNP) is how to excite the imagination and passion of the Jamaican people; how to win the credibility of large numbers of people who have become cynical, disaffected and politically apathetic; and how to rebuild its internal party structures and grassroots organisational base.
A NEW PNP
To put it quite bluntly, the PNP has to start preparing how to avoid losing the next general election. For it is the natural assumption that this is its final term in office. Except, one get the sense that what you are putting to the Jamaican electorate is not the PNP which has been in power for the last four terms but a new and different PNP a PNP with some continuity with the best traditions of the last 65 years but one totally refashioned to meet the new demands and fresh challenges of the 21st century.
This is why the PNP delegates have to be even more careful and deliberative in their selection of a successor to their party leader than the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). For it must be assumed thaat there would be a natural traction to the Opposition party if you have been in power for four terms.
This is why it is critically important that the new leader of the PNP has the energy, vision, leadership acumen, and the dynamism and credibility to convince the Jamaican people that a vote for the PNP in the next general election would be for a truly first-term team.
The ideas of people like Paul Burke and the others behind the Region Seven initiative are the kinds of ideas which the party must consider as it prepares to market itself anew and rebrand itself in the effort to push popular support away from the JLP. What are the most important issues with which the PNP needs to concern itself
as it prepares for its first term beyond the fourth and the post-P. J. Patterson era?
POLITICAL EDUCATION
Importantly, there has been talk about the need for political education. Talk-show host, Beverley Manley, said one comrade put it to her this way recently: "Mrs. Manley, how the party mash up so?" DK Duncan in his Gleaner column last Tuesday highlighted the decline of the PNP groups.
Of the 60 constituencies, close to 30 have five or fewer delegates and almost 20 constituencies have no delegates at all.
Says the former General Secretary of the party and Minister of National Mobilisation: "Usually most constituencies would have 20 or more delegates. On the other hand, 17 of the 60 constituencies account for approximately 1,000 of the 1,300 constituency delegates with three of these totaling just under 500. This is as
unrepresentative as one can get." Our concern should be less with the events of yesterday and more with the fact that the PNP itself has been hit with the political inertia which characterises the country. If it's one thing you could depend on the PNP for, in good or bad times nationally, is a strong internal structure, a strong base, with the Comrades standing firm.
Minister of National Security, Peter Phillips, said in a Breakfast Club interview last week that the delegate count was the lowest he had remembered in 30 years.
Beverley Manley agreed wholeheartedly. Phillips correctly analysed some of the roots of the problem. A way had to be found, he suggested, to use political education to make people see party involvement not as a means of personal advancement but as a means of building something outside of themselves. The challenge, he saw clearly, was how to give people a sense that they were a part of a movement a movement of destiny, if you like. A movement with a glorious history and tradition and a historic mission a mission whose fulfilment beckons to them.
OF BENEFITS AND SPOILS
If the PNP does not take seriously this political education and if it does not start right after this conference it can prepare for a not too graceful exit at the next elections. The PNP must first realise the gargantuan, Herculean task which this involves. It is totally counter-cultural.
The ethos today is that of self-aggrandisement and self-advancement. It is almost exclusively of benefits politics. Politics has always been about spoils and scarce benefits, and being a part of the "runnings", but for many of the 65 years of PNP history there were people attracted to the party because they saw it as a vehicle
to accomplish larger goals and to fulfil a greater vision.
As the state has become leaner over the years and as the economy has become more liberalised and privatised, there have been fewer resources to buy people's loyalty and support. Therefore, many hangers-on have dropped off from the PNP groups. Downsizing and rationalising of the civil service has robbed the state of the ability to pack the Government sector with party supporters and their relatives. And international aid has declined, leaving the state with fewer resources to lavish its largesse on supporters.
Besides, the days of the big factories employing hundreds of unskilled people are gone in Jamaica and while JAMPRO can boast about foreign direct investment inflows not doing badly, those investments are largely capital-intensive and skill-intensive.
The unskilled workforce and the lumpen proletariat are left out in the cold. The free market has rendered them unfit and uncompetitive, leaving them to fend for themselves and so they have: By various types of hustling, prostitution, extortion, etcetera. We have so resigned ourselves to this marginalization that we are speaking of creating red light districts rather than business districts!
So the party which forms the Government does not have the resources to attract people who are "looking something" from its groups. In addition, the private sector, local and foreign, is not filling the breach. And you wonder why there is this political inertia and apathy and why social tensions are increasing in the society?
RECONNECT WITH THE PEOPLE
Pretty speeches today might elicit the usual "forward" and "wheel", and the histrionics and theatrics will provide some good entertainment and produce some passion at the National Arena, but that is not sustainable. The party leader's task today is not to sound triumphalistic, trumpeting assorted solid achievements, dispensing promises, reeling off growth figures in various sectors or gloating over successes in tourism.
The Party leader must remember he is not just speaking to his Opposition critics who are charging him with failure, necessitating a stern and persuasive rejoinder. He is not just debating people like Audley Shaw who are quick to cry doom.
He must answer the Opposition JLP and his critics in media, yes. But there is a more substantial audience who are turned off from politicians generally and who are not about to run into the arms of the JLP just so.
They are hurting; they have had their dreams dashed as a result of falling living standards; they regularly have their expectations frustrated. Replying to critics by showing the significant infrastructural improvements which have been made, the rebound of bauxite and tourism, the decline in poverty rates by objective empirical statistics, and the growth in the economy over the last few quarters is only going to deepen their sense that the PNP is out of touch with everyday reality.
If statistics and the "facts' don't accord with people's perceptions, then parading those facts and statistics only strengthens alienation, incredulity and, indeed, revulsion.
To connect with the people, the PNP needs to connect with people's suffering, their sense that they are not moving ahead, their sense that the country is in imminent danger of social collapse and their sense of hopelessness. Even if the PNP believes that objective reality does not justify people's perceptions, and even if it is felt that it is media manipulation which gives this sense of retrogression rather than progress, then commonsense and a grasp of simple psychology suggest that the party has to confront these perceptions and confront them not belligerently but empathetically and gently.
VICTIM OF THE PAST
The PNP is a victim of its past. It has an intense difficulty in walking out of the shadow of the 1970s. The PNP needs not just political and sociological analysis, it needs psychoanalysis. It is so terrified of the era in which it overplayed ideology and scared off the ruling and middle classes that it seems afraid to reassert ideology. And yet how can it rebuild its groups, mobilise membership at the grassroots with limited resources, if it has nothing to give people to believe in and to put their hearts into?
Why should people be PNP rather than JLP? Because the PNP can run a better market economy and can deliver greater economic growth? Because it has the brightest people? You can't build party identity on those bases.
Besides, anyone who is following developments in the global economy, including international capital flows, foreign direct investment, international trade and the increasing globalization of not just the world economy but the world society, will know that the national 'space" is getting increasingly smaller. You can't over-sell economic growth.
A number of people believe that once the economy starts growing, living standards will automatically improve. False. You have the phenomenon of "jobless growth" all over the world, and the situation where an economy becomes very sophisticated and attracts information-intensive investments and produces economic growth but yet large numbers of people are left out of the benefits and have to create their own space often literally fighting for that crowded space.
We have not had economic growth for a number of years and we are so yearning for it. Now that we have begun to see some growth, I am afraid many will be bitterly disappointed with its fruits. IF the new PNP can't give people something more than jobs, housing, low inflation and the ability to indulge their fascination with North American lifestyles, then the party can forget about building a sustainable base.
The PNP needs people like Paul Burke who have a remarkable ability to connect with people, to articulate the feelings of the disaffected and who come across with
credibility and heart. Paul Burke can speak to and relate to all classes and my advice to the PNP is that if it really wants to transform itself it should listen to Comrade Burke.
This is the hour of decision.
* Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist. You can e-mail your comments to ianboyne1@yahoo.com
