Dawn RitchLast Sunday, the latest Gleaner-commissioned Don Anderson poll showed that Bruce Golding "... has remained a mediocre political figure in the public eye ... the Opposition has been unable to seize the confidence of the majority of Jamaicans."
Golding's performance in the past month as Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) Opposition Leader has been rated negatively by 77 per cent of the country. This represents a further decline in his job rating since it was last measured in June this year. Bruce Golding took the reins of the Jamaica Labour Party nine months ago.
bitter pill to swallow
It seems the bad news just keeps on rolling in for the Opposition party and Mr. Golding's stewardship of it. It's a bitter pill to swallow. Having unceremoniously dumped its then leader Edward Seaga after 30 years, the party finds itself with someone much worse, and whose approval rating is worse than Seaga's ever was even, at its lowest.
The party, not in good shape to begin with, has now found itself rejected even as an Opposition party. The question the Anderson poll asked was: "How would you rate the JLP and Bruce Golding's performance as Opposition leader?"
With a 77 per cent rejection rate from the Jamaican people, Bruce Golding ought to stop wasting his time and other people's money.
The difference between the JLP and the People's National Party (PNP) is Mrs. Portia Simpson Miller. Throughout the leadership race in the PNP, the Peter Phillips camp has made it known that they believe they control the support of the majority of the PNP Members of Parliament in the matter.
The matter is the PNP selection for presidency, whenever the Prime Minister announces the date of his departure. Some 4,000 PNP delegates will
vote for the new president so it doesn't really have to do with PNP Members of Parliament.
Under the Jamaican Constitu-tion however, the law states that the sitting PNP MPs, must advise the Governor-General on who commands their majority support. The Peter Phillips camp is saying it won't be Portia.
The thing is she's prepared to put it to the test, no doubt in the confidence that good sense
will prevail, and the future PNP president and Prime Minister won't be two different people. That's a great deal of confidence to have in her ministerial colleagues, when more than a few of them have been unbelievably rude about her.
everybody's A successor
There's nobody like that in
the JLP. Not in 30 years has a majority of JLP Members of Parliament, despite all the grumbling and in-fighting, been prepared to go to the Governor-General and advise that Edward Seaga and now Bruce Golding no longer commands the
majority of their support, as required under the Jamaican
constitution.
The reason is that for the past 15 years in the JLP, everybody has thought of himself as successor to Seaga and so wouldn't support anybody else for the position. This is what allowed Bruce Golding to come in and capture it without a contest, without even a single election.
This was not good for either the health of the party, nor that of democracy in Jamaica. The current Anderson polls, the only organisation accurate in the last general elections, have now borne sad testimony to that fact.
It has seemed to me over the years, that all the JLP MPs were concerned about in the end was their driver, their duty-free car, foreign health insurance and trips abroad at the public's expense. They were being richly rewarded for failing to carry out their constitutional duties.
The purpose of a political party is to win state power, not to find unending excuses for failing to do so. The JLP didn't conclude it was Seaga who was unelectable in all that time. They may have said so privately, but made absolutely no move to resolve the situation constitutionally.
Bruce Golding, impatient and busily stirring up things, was at the bottom of the Gang of Five and the Gang of Eleven. After that, he went on to form his own party, ran against the JLP, failed at that and came back to be
handed its leadership on a silver platter. The 'wimps, lackeys and yes men' had triumphed once again.
It is hard to feel hope for a party like that, much less have any confidence in its prospects of being an alternative to a failed government. Somebody somewhere in it has to be ready to subject himself to a vote of his peers within his own party. But no, the political culture has become one of people waiting around for party positions to be handed out like desk jobs.
centralisation
On top of all of this, the JLP hasn't had an islandwide brand system since the early 1980s. It was abandoned as untidy by a fervour of centralisation under Edward Seaga. It hasn't won an election since.
The party needs to re-build itself from the ground up, and stop worrying about who is to lead it. Had the branch system been in place... the teachers, the shop-keepers and the used-to-be post mistresses ... we would have been spared 15 years of PNP incompetence and jobs for the boys.
Instead, the JLP chose to stand on its record of the 60s and 80s, as though time does not march on, and the Jamaican people automatically genuflect. It is a political strategy that has not worked, and will not work.
The major problem in politics, local and national, is that the vast majority of Jamaicans don't care about it. They're apathetic. It's a by-product of modern civilization. It seems unreasonable therefore to care about what the uncommitted say, when they have made a calling out of being uncommitted.
I don't believe in the
infallibility of polls, but when polls confirm something that was obvious to everybody, it's hard to throw them out. It's equally hard to cast aside my own observations simply because they're confirmed by polls.
Polls confirm that Omar Davies is a waste of time, that Peter Phillips is the same old thing and that Bruce Golding is mediocre.
Given these three obviously patent truths, one has to give great credibility to the poll
finding that Mrs. Simpson Miller is by far the most popular politician in the country. The only question is whether the PNP delegates will select a candidate who is bound to lose, or a candidate who is a front-runner in the minds of others.
The JLP cannot rely on the PNP to make a selection of Omar Davies or Peter Phillips. It has to be borne in mind that the PNP delegates may judge one to win the election, and may well want a candidate who controls the support of the population at large, and not a candidate with a Ph.D., buffeted and surrounded by failed MPs.
