During the last few weeks, the attention of the Jamaican population has been riveted on a contest for the leadership of the Jamaica Labour Party, brought on by the decision of Deputy Leader and former Minister of Finance, Audley Shaw, to challenge the incumbent Political Leader and Leader of the Opposition, Andrew Holness.
Holness himself succeeded then Political Leader and Prime Minister Bruce Golding, Golding having been a victim of the so-called Dudus drug scandal brought on by his resistance to a request by the US to allow the extradition of a resident of his constituency, Western Kingston, originally held for many years by former Prime Minister Edward Seaga.
Holness, was elected Political Leader and Prime Minister in October 2011, with Audley Shaw who had been Deputy Leader of the party for over a decade and also Minister of Finance, remaining as deputy to Holness. But in retrospect, Shaw obviously felt that with his dual political and governmental experience he was entitled to lead the party and government on this occasion.
Shaw’s feeling would appear to have been enhanced as, over the years since the JLP’s defeat in the general elections of January 2012, Holness has seemed to be unable to launch any serious assault on a PNP government facing the same problems vis-à-vis the IMF that the JLP had faced. This feeling will have been exacerbated after the PNP eventually achieved an agreement with the IMF, with the Government seeming to have persuaded the electorate that while such an agreement was really not all that the country required, the economic position of Jamaica did not permit the exertion of any pressure for better terms.
Shaw’s decision to challenge Holness who had taken the reins at the early age of 39 in 2011 appears to have shocked some of the leading personalities in the party, who seemed to have felt that Shaw’s period as Minister of Finance during the last JLP administration did not suggest that he could have produced a better deal than the current one which the IMF has approved.
In that context, Shaw, indeed, had been Minister of Finance from 2007 to 2012, and seemed to have been inextricably bound to the leadership of both government and party, whether held by Golding or Holness. There was therefore nothing that he could really challenge Holness on, given that the party was now in opposition and, whether led by Shaw or Holness, could not at this point, really challenge the PNP in any manner to suggest to JLP supporters that he would make a difference in the near future.
The years since the decisive result of the general elections of 2011 have really suggested that the Jamaican voters are prepared to hold on to what they have, particularly as it is now obvious that neither party is able to produce any better result than the other in negotiations with the IMF. It would appear that the current package is seen as dealing substantially with a slow recovery from the country’s extensive debt, rather than with any prospect of substantial economic growth in the near future.
Shaw therefore sought to conduct his campaign not on Holness’s inability to make a better case against the PNP government than himself, but rather on the issue of who had the ability to regenerate the party in preparation for the next election. Even there, however, Shaw could not shake off the fact that he had been Deputy Leader for over a decade, and did not seem to have succeeded in persuading either Bruce Golding or the wider party, that there were alternatives either to the Dudus affair or to the pattern of negotiation with the IMF. Nor did he seem to make any effort towards reorganization of the JLP.
For what the recent leadership campaign and party elections really showed was that there had been little adherence to the rules of party organization over many years, and that an urgent task was one of ensuring that constituencies put their own organizations in shape. From that perspective Shaw, as long-serving Deputy Leader, could hardly make a claim to greater competence than the relatively new boy on the block, Holness.
What was clear was that the leadership of the party, for so long dominated by the period of rule of Alexander Bustamante, had for years been organized on the basis of chosen heir apparents, rather than of competition – first the short-lived Donald Sangster, then the aggressive Edward Seaga, and then Bruce Golding who, having left the party to form his own during Seaga’s reign, returned to claim leadership on the basis of family longevity in the organization. So to many the party had become an organizational anachronism, and certainly so when compared, apparently, with its opponent, the now ruling Peoples National Party.
Holness has now admitted that the election has forced the party to determine to begin to democratize its operations, a task to which Shaw has quickly committed himself. But in the traditions of Caribbean politics, it is left to be seen whether my enemy of yesterday can be my bosom friend today, or whether the relatively youthful Holness will move to find alternative leadership support to assist him with the party’s regeneration.
Of course, worth consideration, given the country’s difficult economic situation, is whether, in Jamaica’s apparently settled two party system, elections will turn on the voters’ gradual alienation from whoever rules, and give the alternative a try without much conviction of its superiority. Holness, at the still early age of 41, may well be hoping to await the evolution of that course.
