Martin Henry
WHEN PARLIAMENT opens in April for the new parliamentary year, the country's three top leaders will be new.
Governor-General Professor Kenneth Hall, the first non-ex-politician at King's House, will be presenting his first Throne Speech on Government policy.
Portia Simpson Miller will have been the principal architect of that Throne Speech, as the country's first female Prime Minister. We will get our best glimpse yet of what 3,808 People's National Party (PNP) delegates and 34 PNP MPs have delivered to us.
And more in the tabling of the estimates of expenditure that same afternoon in Parliament. It will be interesting to see who tables those. new Prime Minister, old Minister of Finance and Planning, old economic and social policy?
CHOMPING AT THE BITS
Bruce Golding will be only in his second year as Leader of the Opposition and chomping at the bits to change roles.
At Independence in 1962 only Professor Hall in the above caste of actors on the political stage may have been old enough to have the vote, at age 21 then - and just barely. This, then, is the last time, in all likelihood, that someone will come to the office of Governor-General, party leader, Prime Minister or Leader of the Opposition who came to adulthood in colonial Jamaica.
The biggest transition upon us, is not the ascension to the office of Prime Minister of a woman. Portia Simpson Miller is a genetic creature of the PNP, bound by the cords of party loyalty and the thin parliamentary majority her party has and from which she must negotiate executive leadership and policy after a campaign with its bitter edges.
The biggest historical transition we are facing is the quiet fading away of those who knew colonial Jamaica and built the post-colonial Jamaica, crooked as it has turned out to be in too many places.
MIXED BAG
There is enough data around on female leadership of countries from the 1950s and even earlier to debunk the sentimental bunkum that women will find better solutions to the problems of governance which men have allegedly not done a good job with. Female leadership has been a very mixed bag. Margaret Thatcher, the greatest of them all, was a military hawk and 'savagely' dismantled Britain's obese social welfare and state ownership systems. The country was revitalised and prospered to the extent that New Labour was forced to adopt Thatcherite policy dressed up in work overalls to escape the political wilderness.
Thatcher listened, as Portia says she will. Thatcher was not only supported in Government by hard-nosed technocrats but by think tanks like the Adam Smith Institute who pragmatically figured out how the real world worked and converted knowledge into policy. Portia herself, without PhD, would have learned a great deal about what does not work from the '70s with Michael Manley and the '90s with P.J. Patterson.
Jamaica dos not need a Momma Prime Minister, nor a nurse. Frankly, I am frightened by the thought which was so popular on the party presidential campaign trail.
What Jamaica urgently needs is a pragmatic leader with just enough charisma to make us take the necessary bitter medicines for national reconstruction with an understanding smile. And in this gender is not a factor. Portia, who happens to be a woman, has many of these qualities.
Portia has 2007 on her mind. Like Patterson in 1992, she will want her own mandate, perhaps well before elections are due. The two party leaders are seated in Parliament from two of the country's tightest garrison constituencies. Portia and Bruce are among the most experienced field marshals of the old politics still in active service, but have spoken many commitments to the new politics, which is really yet to be born. Their constituencies abut among the decay and violence of the inner-city.
STAKES ARE HIGH
The stakes, retaining power with margins dangerously thinning vs wresting power after too long in the wilderness, are high. The political acrimony of Seaga/JLP and Manley/PNP has been the single most destructive factor in Jamaica's independent history and the biggest inhibitor of national progress. Even when those leaders finally all leave the stage, and Portia is one of them, the legacy will linger.
Saturday's euphoria will soon wear off. The hard tasks of governing and fighting for political power are about to set in. The risks of regression to elements of old politics are real. The mettle of leadership, woman or man, will matter much.
The same enthusiasm and exuberance with which media over-covered the PNP presidential campaign, the private sector pursued debate and citizens voiced their voteless choices must now be applied to ensure no return to the old but the maintaining of the promised pathway to peace and prosperity.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
