- Junior DowieOpposition Leader Edward Seaga.
Following is the first part of an interview with Edward Seaga, Leader of the Opposition Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), by Senior Associate Editor Lloyd Williams.
EDWARD PHILLIP George Seaga, usually deadpan, can be quite humorous when he is ready.
Japan, July 17, 1985. Mr. Seaga is attending the large and important Tsukuba science and technology exhibition. An executive from a high-tech telecommunications company hands him what then was probably a newly-developed cellular phone.
"Prime Minister," he said, "you can call anywhere in the world on this phone, just by dialling the country code and the phone number."
An intrigued Mr. Seaga took the phone, looked at his watch, dialled and listened. A smile transformed his expressionless face.
"Oh," he said to the man, "this is nothing new. (Astonishment registered in the man's face.) We have had this in Jamaica for years - especially when it rains."
Mr. Seaga hands the phone to me. Coming from the earpiece was a steady stream of frying, crackling "statics" - reminiscent of steady rain on a Jamaican zinc roof. I joined him in laughing long and hard.
In a extended interview at his third-floor New Kingston office on Thursday afternoon, Mr. Seaga was vintage serious.
He lashed out against the Labourites who he said were undermining the party and served warning on once-expelled Karl Samuda, that he had better tow the line.
Mr. Seaga has no problem with stepping down from the JLP leadership, but when he does there must be systems and processes to take the place of a dominant leader - like Edward Seaga.
Lloyd Williams: Mr. Seaga, some people who insist that the JLP is their first love, express the view that you are no longer capable of leading the party to another election victory and that the JLP will continue to lose if you remain its leader. Recently they have been pointing to public opinion polls which they claim say the same thing. Are they wrong?
Edward Seaga: The question that you have posed has become popular folklore, largely as a result of poll data. However, the poll data doesn't quite say the same thing by any means because, if you look at this last Mark Wignall poll that was taken in May you will see the question asked. In the May 2000 poll, the uncommitted has remained at 44 per cent. The PNP and JLP have both fallen in support but are still in a statistical dead heat. Very important. The party which has suffered the most is the NDM which dips from 14 per cent to six per cent.
An intense Mr. Seaga, in blue suit, blue shirt and blue tie with green stripes, leans forward in his chair and clasps his hands.
E.S.: Now what we are saying here is that a party which is in a dead heat with the present leader can't win an election. And bear in mind that this poll was taken right after the Budget, so it gave the PNP an advantage, and right after, a previous poll by Don Anderson, which has since been established to be a nonsense poll, caused quite a bit of anxiety if not hysteria among JLP supporters because that poll said that our support had dipped to 12 per cent. So the poll was taken at the most disadvantageous time for us and the most advantageous time for the PNP. And yet we are in a dead heat under the present leader.
So if that be the case, the question of leadership doesn't seem to be the point of reference that ought to be of great concern. Further, the poll goes on to say: "Among those who are saying that they won't vote JLP, the following are the reasons": Firstly, no special reason - 59 per cent, and it goes on to say: 'Too much infighting in the JLP/Don't like Seaga, two per cent.
So I don't know that you can conclude that there is any statistical basis for this position. It asks other questions later which have their own erroneous base...
Mr. Seaga described the poll as "as far as statistics goes, a tragedy for the reputation of the Stone Poll."
L.W.: The internal problems dominating the JLP right now - the dismissal of Karl Samuda as Leader of Opposition Business in the House, for example, suggests that the party is disunited and is disintegrating. Is this so?
He was adamant that there is a feeling that has been nurtured partly by the press and partly emanating from persons within the JLP itself for their own purposes, to fulfill their own agenda and that has been picked up and has been carried in the media and therefore has become sort of like established fact.
Mr. Seaga: Now the funny thing about this is that what I did was to have revoked the appointment of Samuda as Leader of Opposition Business. I did not revoke his appointment as Spokesperson on Trade and Industry. When (Prime Minister P.J.) Patterson revoked the appointment of Easton Douglas (as Minister of the Environment and Housing), I don't recall anybody questioning him and asking him why and whether this was a sign of disintegration in the PNP, and I don't expect that the JLP should be treated in any different manner.
Prerogatives
The fact of the matter is that these changes in appointment that are the prerogatives of the leader of either party, come from time to time, depending upon what is your disposition towards the individual and whether you feel that they can do the job. I happen at this time to feel that Samuda cannot continue as Leader of Opposition Business in the House of Representatives and I revoked his appointment accordingly. Now, that in itself is no sign of disintegration within the party.
Settling back in his chair, Mr. Seaga said he would be very frank as he believed he was at fault in not bringing the public of Jamaica more fully into the background considerations and conditions that he has had to face over the last 10 years and what his objectives were.
Mr. Seaga: Over the last 10 years my objective has been to settle down the Jamaica Labour Party into a new political culture on the basis of which I could then step out and a new successor step in. That political culture is one in which the party would be run not by a strong personality but by systems, and by structures and by processes. And so, we started the exercise by a virtual re-writing of the constitution of the party and the constitution of the party today looks considerably different from what it was 10 years ago. It provides for systems and it provides for organisations to do various things.
The purpose of that is that it was my intention to ensure that any newly-elected leader and leadership would be able to have full control over the body of membership and other lesser leaders by having the necessary rules and regulations by which they must abide and which they would be required to abide by. So that it would not require any dominant personality to impose the party's will, but the party's will could be imposed by virtue of the structures of the party and the systems under which it operates and the processes which it must follow.
However, in the course of doing this, an exercise that should have taken no more than three years, we had the destabalising factor which began with the Gang of Five in the early '90s and which was an attempt to frustrate my leadership in order to get me out of the way to enable them to hijack the leadership of the party. And I had to fight that off because I did not consider that they had the necessary persons within their ranks to be a suitable successor.
Having done that and the 1993 election passed, we settled again once more to continue this process of creating systems in the party so that members of the party would respect the systems and not be under the control of any dominating leader.
Again, another destabilisation occurred. This time Bruce Golding and the 11 dissidents from the west. Again this revolved around the question of leadership. Many of those who were in that group of 11 were persons who were disappointed that I had not given them a position after the '93 election and that I had not responded to particular priorities on their own personal agenda. And as a result, finding that they could not get me to do what they wanted, they decided to become a group that would put pressure on the party internally and eventually when the party reacted with a vote of confidence in me, they left.
Golding left for his own reasons, but having to do, I am sure, with the question of where the party was going insofar as his own personal leadership ambitions were concerned.
Then came the '97 election and again we settled down after that to continue the process of creating the structural systems which would be the basis on which the party would be regulated and would operate. That has been proceeding better now than in most of the previous attempts and we are reaching a point where we can see the ending of this exercise.
But, at the same time now comes a third destabilising attempt and this time from a group in which Samuda is involved, and some other leaders, inclusive of those who feel that when I step out they must step in as leaders. To that extent they are determined that they are going to take over control of the party one way or the other. Now, that group has not fared well as far as the decision of the people and the support of the people and the delegates are concerned, because when the party has its annual conference and members of that group put themselves up for election they have been, with regularity, defeated.
Samuda himself was defeated by a vote of 2-1 by Ken Baugh for the general secretary position. And so they realise now that they do not have the base support to be able to form a majority within the party voting ranks to enable them to become selected or elected into leadership positions. I am not by this saying that any specific one is the one who is being put forward as leader. Most of them entertain leadership ambitions and some will tell you they don't, but they want to be the power behind the throne.
So, what we have here is a group that having been defeated in the last round of elections at conference, now flaunt the most basic principles of democracy - that if you run and you lose you still stay within the fold and you continue. Instead, they withdraw themselves.
"Samuda himself has not been back to the party office to (weekly) Standing Committee meetings except within recent weeks when he came for the purpose of discussion of the report from a meeting which he held privately. But he has not attended any Standing Committee meeting. Now by virtue of pulling themselves out, they make the claim that the party is split, it is not united, because it is a party on the one hand and them on the other. But the 'them' on the other is a small minority. And in any democracy that is how it operates. Then they use it as the basis of a propaganda which is picked up by the media - which is responsive to all this propaganda - as a party that is disunited.
The party is very united around the great majority. The small minority that did not find favour that have pulled themselves out has not made any difference to the operations of the party. So their cry is that we must have unity and therefore meetings are to be held for unity.
Now what is this unity? Nothing is preventing them from coming into the party and serving - there is no block on any of them except Mike Henry - and his period has expired - but they stay on the outside deliberately in order to be able to say to other dissidents on the outside who have lost their own positions in the party for one reason or another.
'Lost respect
Mr. Seaga singled out the Mike Williams group, all of whom he said "lost the respect of their constituencies."
He said that in the case of Mike Williams, the delegates of his constituency called him to Belmont Road and before the leaders of the party, told him that they didn't want him.
E.S.: In the case of Bindley Sangster he was told by the delegates of his constituency they didn't want him. In the case of Garth Martin, a poll gave us the result that he was not a popular person in his constituency. I won't bother with C. Lloyd Allen because he is smarting from the fact that I never appointed him Shadow Spokesman on Sport.
But they form themselves into a group of dissidents along with some other low-level figures and this is what Samuda is trying to collect up in order to bring them back into the party to swell the ranks so that their 20 per cent or 30 per cent
of support could swell and on that basis hoping it will give them the majority on the basis of which they could get selected as the leaders of the party. So it is purely a political ploy that is being passed off under an umbrella of propaganda that there is disunity in the party.
In the Jamaica Labour Party, as reflected by the great majority of those who are operating and serving within the party, there is no disunity. Such disunity as they consider it to be is because the minority who did not gain favour in terms of the elections have withdrawn themselves and therefore set themselves up outside as not being a part of the party. Well democracy don't guh suh and it is a fundamental breach of democratic principles."
TO BE CONTINUED
