Rex Nettleford
THE OFFICE of Prime Minister or of the chief executive in the West-minster-type governmental enterprise embodies a special kind of political leadership. The incumbent has after all emerged from being primus inter pares into something of emperor or a de facto monarch of all he or she surveys.
Sustaining the imperium is however, the most difficult of tasks in a truly competitive electoral dispensation as Margaret Thatcher and her great role model, Winston Churchill (like France's Charles deGaulle their kindred spirit), were to discover. Alexander Bustamante and Michael Manley of Jamaica, George Price of Belize, Errol Barrow of Barbados and Lynden Pindling of The Bahamas also came to understand this. They all experienced defeat at the polls following sustained periods of great personal popularity. Popularity sometimes kills its own product.
Guyana's Forbes Burnham and Trinidad and Tobago's Eric Williams may have escaped this by dying in office, but they both departed in greatly reduced circumstances as far as their populist attraction was concerned. What Prime Ministers are initially hailed for can in time be rejected by an electorate in search of something that promises more than they think they may be getting; and this is so however well such revered leaders, locked in the embrace of their adoring publics may have met at one time or another the harrowing demands of messianic leadership.
INSPIRATION
What experience is really needed of such leaders in the Commonwealth Caribbean? The Prime Minister as numero uno or Maximum Leader is expected to provide a certain kind of inspiration for the populace by making people feel good about their country. Patriotism and the nation-state are, after all, still political realities at end-of-century despite indications to the contrary in an increasingly globalised dispensation.
The Maximum Leader is expected to depict an unquenchable thirst for action. A desk-bound bureaucrat given to the concoction of blueprints for five-year plans and to rhetoric that leads nowhere near implementation is not likely to get very far. Rather than wait to be prodded, such a leader in Churchill's words must be "the prod".
A Caribbean Prime Minister is also expected to be the embodiment of hope when much around spells despair. He/she can never succumb to defeatism even when all others are in doubt. Such is the resoluteness which fueled the efforts of the early self-government protagonists when they insisted that independence could be viable for the tiniest of Caribbean island states.
Norman Manley insisted on universal adult suffrage when nearly all others around him thought otherwise back in 1938. And Michael Manley darted energetically into the North-South dialogue when a great many Jamaicans failed to see the implications that a post-war globalised economy had for Jamaica and the rest of the Third World.
Above all, a Caribbean Prime Minister worth the name has been expected to exhibit certain qualities needed in a charismatic leader. "He must aim high, show that he has vision, act on the grand scale, and so establish his authority over the generality of men who splash in the shallow water" according to a London Times editorial of October 1993.
Such was the grandeur of a Churchill, a Nehru, an Nkrumah, a Kenyatta, and one would dare say a Bustamante and Norman Manley (as founding fathers), as well as an Eric Williams and a Michael Manley with their clear sense of destiny in independence. But such 'grandeur' rooted
in charisma harbours both suspicion and praise. Norman Manley distrusted it though he went along with the idea of being 'the man with the plan' as his party's slogan for the 1962 elections which he lost. Adoring publics can be very fickle and pernickety. Edward Seaga made it clear he was not in a popularity contest for power, and P.J. Patterson steered clear of populism.
Popular prime ministers or executive Presidents inevitably undergo periods of deflation both in and out of office.
Unfortunately, the debunking sometimes verges on vendetta and political assassination justified by media practitioners in the name of the public accountability required of political leaders or on the basis of scientific investigation into character by 'objective' academics.
UNIMPEACHABLE EXEMPLARS
Often, not enough effort is made to capture the full human dimension of a charismatic leader. In mistakenly discounting the importance of charisma and rhetoric in the making of a world leader (as in the case of a J.F. Kennedy of the United States or the Caribbean's Michael Manley, who became a major world advocate of the New International Economic Order), the complex multifaceted persona becomes a one-dimensional entity in the hands of inexpert political biographers and popular commentators.
The matter of transparency in personal dealings in public affairs is demanded of all political leaders. But in this prime ministers are expected to be unimpeachable exemplars. The slightest indication of the use of their preferred position as head of government to access favours from friends or acquaintances in good economic standing or position of great influence, is likely to breed suspicion and to be regarded by some as a crime against the social order. This has not deterred some well-publicised cases of lapse integrity among highly-placed Caribbean leaders, however.
Still, even the otherwise normal efforts on the part of an ex-prime minister to earn a legitimate living are likely to be scrutinised with microscopic assiduity by supporters and detractors alike. The offer to Michael Manley of a research fellowship by the Ottawa-based International Centre for Development Research (IRDC) became a matter of political wrangling among opponents in Jamaica.
Manley decided not to make a formal application though he was encouraged so to do. Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau regretted that he decided not to. He was later to go on to the lecture circuit attracting invitations from many universities and civic organisations in the United States and Canada and died before he could take up the endowed Michael Manley Chair in Public Affairs and public policy at University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona.
Prime Minister Erskine Sandiford of Barbados years later became a research fellow with the Institute of Social and Economic Studies (later SALISES) with the UWI at Cave Hill. Edward Seaga is now a Distinguished Fellow in the UWI School of Graduate Studies at Mona and P.J. Patterson is yet to publicly declare his plans for retirement. He was a member of a legal firm and could probably return to it. Controversy attended the effort of both Manley and Seaga to earn a decent living after serving their country.
GUIDELINES
The need for appropriate guidelines regulating dealings between ex-prime minister and former Cabinet members on the one hand, and corporate bodies on the other, soon after the former's departure from office may well suggest itself if unnecessary unease and doubt are to be avoided. But it will always be disputatious as to whether a former prime minister carries more weight than an ordinary contender for paid services since some will never be convinced that this allows for a level playing field.
Against this must be balanced the clear need for justice and fair play, not only for the society at large, but also for an ex-prime minister or a former minister of government who must be able to earn a decent living to meet the mundane obligations of a normal adult in society. Societies have an obligation to those who serve them as those who serve have to society.
