Dawn Ritch, Contributor
WHILE OPPOSITION Leader Edward Seaga was trying, he said, to change the political culture in the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) "...the 1993 election passed and we settled once again to continue this process...Then came the '97 election, and again we settled down after that to continue the process."
This was said in last week's exclusive interview with this newspaper, probably one of the longest on record.
It seems that general elections are only an interruption in his process of "settling down the party". Indeed, general elections seem to only mark time and distract him from the exciting mission of "settling down the party" in which he has been engaged for the last decade.
And how does he wish to settle down a party that has spent all this time in abuse of each other in the press? Not with a successor, but with systems, structures and processes.
"Not by having to be a strong personality," he says, "as I do not see that strong personality who can do so. And at any rate it is better if we have a system."
Mr. Seaga never tires of pointing out that he thinks there is nobody in the JLP who is capable of succeeding him.
He is now, he says, "in the final stages" of this process. No doubt putting in a welter of committees and councils, the effect of which it seems to me will be to leave the party after his departure, not in ashes as expected but a state of gridlock.
His successor might as well be, therefore, the most long-serving janitor at Belmont Road. Because it is too clear to me that Mr. Seaga intends to have the party acrimoniously fine-tune itself forever, rather than start the engine and hit the road.
A piece of the party exhaust will be in one committee, the engine block in another, and since Mr. Seaga will not resign his seat in Tivoli even when he resigns as Leader, the drive train for the JLP will doubtless still be stored in his luxurious offices in New Kingston.
Lost interest
The man who eliminated the branch system of the JLP shortly after becoming its leader in 1974, cannot really be interested in party structure.
In those days, teachers, post mistresses and shopkeepers were the basic cell of the JLP, not area dons. They monitored the needs of rural communities and the work of the parish councils. The public need not be reminded either, that, after he won state power in 1980, Mr. Seaga then suspended the activities of the KSAC council, which the PNP brought back when they won in 1989.
Of course, a PNP Government could not reasonably be expected to resurrect the JLP branch system as well.
Its loss means, however, that the JLP has been deprived of the advice and interest of decent, well-thinking community leaders all over Jamaica for over two decades.
Not that this troubles Mr. Seaga very much. He does all the thinking anyone could possible need. As he said to The Gleaner last week: "The (JLP) manifesto is not discussed at low-level meetings, the manifesto is produced by a high level policy-making body which is under my committee chairmanship, and has been from ever since I can remember in the Labour Party."
That the JLP has for 20 years failed to produce an election-winning manifesto apparently in no way diminishes his chairmanship of that committee.
Mr. Seaga defines dissidents as people whose constituents don't want them. His understanding of electoral victory has, therefore, understandably become feeble, and his expectations visibly lowered.
His party's electoral record is simply that "some members have organised their constituencies, they are seated in the House of Representatives, the ones who didn't care are not."
Since the JLP's perennial lack of state power is everybody else's fault but his own, Mr. Seaga in his final stages proposes a party central that will do everything for candidates including full canvasses.
Pipedream
This is a pipedream. Party central proved itself unable even to distribute the procedures for electoral appeals from the constituted authority after the last general election.
Twenty-one JLP appeals were made to that authority, some of which I understand had good grounds, but could not be entertained because they failed to comply with these procedures which were sent to the party's general-secretary. Perhaps they should have been sent to Mr. Seaga himself.
However, in addition to the interruptions caused by general elections, Mr. Seaga's long-awaited departure from the JLP has also been delayed, he says, by three attempts to destabilize his process of installing systems and structures. The Gang of Five, the Gang of Eleven, and now a third, in which he claims Karl Samuda is involved.
Whatever else may have been achieved by this so-called process (and I believe it is only his continuing dominance of the party and its gridlock afterwards) the process has not been able to achieve an electoral victory which ought to be the object of this decade long exercise. What he's doing isn't working, so he ought to try something else. Unless, of course, he doesn't wish to win a general election.
Listening to him last week on radio, it seemed to me that our Opposition Leader is only energized when he is fighting his own people. It would seem from his print interview, on the other hand, that there is a marked lack of enthusiasm for general elections.
