Preparing for government

Published in the Jamaica Gleaner: Wednesday | August 15, 2007

Today we continue excerpts from former advertising executive Gerry Grindley's explosive book, Judas Mentality. It can be purchased through amazon.com

As I worked with Michael Manley, my thoughts about what governing a nation ought to be, continued to develop into some serious political musings. It was a constant internal debate with the self that had my mind entrenched in probing the plethora of angles that politics typically tends to have. I think most will agree that the application of strategic thinking is of paramount importance to the management of a political institution that has the intention of metamorphosing into the greater institution, which is government.

However, this very simple hypothesis was represented nowhere in the JLP. It became increasingly clear to me that the application of strategic thinking was taking place in one party and not at all in the other. The sort of sophistication of the political system that I had expected at such a crucial time in Jamaica's development as a sovereign nation was just not flowing from the JLP. They seemed to lack newness and originality in their approach to thinking out positions that had a national perspective.

I think that this trend compromised the potential of the general body politic. One got the feeling that they were always borrowing ideas, and even this loan was transmitted to the people devoid of originality and political flair. They could not even pretty up a stolen concept and deliver it with style. Moreover, as soon as anybody within the party came up with a new idea and proposed a plan for its execution, it was always interpreted to mean that that person's mission was to upstage party executives and so it had to be squashed. This mentality managed to pervade the party rapidly. The result was that the party's brightest stars were constantly being chased out. Not good. In fact, very bad.

No institution can yield benefits to humans without the existence within that institution of dynamic thinking from its human resource. There existed no accommodation for brilliance, no respect for things new and modern. Their lack of both originality and profundity were constant themes emanating from all that they did. It was a continuous demonstration of a deficit of thinking in their overall style and image.

SOME ELEMENTS OF CONCERN

As I watched this unflattering progression of the Jamaica Labour Party, I consolidated my thoughts and came to the conclusion that it was either that they could be original and were just incapable of communicating their originality or that they were just plain out not original at all. I found the JLP's deficit to be quite frustrating.

Was this the best bipartisan system Jamaica could deliver?

A good idea went straight into inertia over at that party, because it was considered to be a man's design to destroy his officers. I found it harder and harder to digest such an obtuse positioning. It was only natural, then, that my relationship with them was lukewarm.

One must not forget that the Most Honorable Hugh Lawson Shearer became leader of the JLP by a vote amongst the executives of that party. This came about when the then sitting Prime Minister Donald Sangster died in a hospital in Canada while in office. Shearer was called in, while away on United Nation's-related travels, to contend for the party's top job. The executive met at the Ward Theatre to vote for the new leader. News had leaked out that the favourite, Clem Tavares, might not win after all, because the vote yielded a tie, and only one vote was left to be cast. It turned out that the vote went to Shearer under a barrage of charges of betrayal, dishonesty, and questionable practices. Notwithstanding, Shearer became leader of the Jamaica Labour Party and, consequently, Prime Minister of Jamaica.

Shearer's victory presented itself as a shock to the nation, as it was felt that the JLP had a far better slate of candidates from which to pool a new leader. Men such as Robert Lightbourne, a popular industrialist; Eddie Seaga, a Harvard graduate; Dr. Herbert Eldermire, member of an erudite family of doctors; Clem Tavares, lawyer and real estate developer; Ian Ramsay, Q.C.; and Ken Jones, to name a few. With this sort of eminence chocked up in one party's human resources, the slate was indeed an impressive one. Something then had to have happened, something curious and far more convoluted than just a straightforward vote among some men. It dawned on me then that, from all indications, Bustamante or Lady Bustamante might have had a hand in how the votes were cast. Hugh Shearer was too simple a man to have been selected leader of the governing party of the time.

It just did not make sense to me that a man bereft of so many of the crucial attributes one must bear in order to become leader of a nation could simply assume that role by a 'transparent' vote. Shearer was famous for coming out with some very awkward 'representations' of the English language.

I began to ponder how this return to sophistry could come about, as I felt passionately about this injustice to leadership and to my country and people. I thought, as arrogant as it may sound, that Jamaica deserved more dexterity and profundity in the character of its leader.

'Busta bloodline'

I had personally believed, for quite some time, that Shearer was closely connected to either Lady Bustamante or Bustamante himself. He had been island supervisor of the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union (BITU), and talk was all over the place that he would eventually take over the union. So, was he really a 'Busta bloodline'?

Could he be an 'outside son,' a stepson, nephew, or real son? Either way, I would certainly not be the one to know, and I was not going to make it any sort of mission of mine to find out. But I was certain that he carried the Busta line of thinking scrupulously and always had the full support of Lady B in all that he did. In dealing with me, I always felt that he was most uncomfortable.

He never looked me in the eye, and he always tried to deliver the perception that he was too busy to talk. He did not speak very clearly, and in justifying his intellectual deficit, he mimicked professional conduct and discredited it by constantly passing remarks to the effect that professional behaviour was a copycat exercise that hailed respect to the colonial past.

Before the historic Ward Theatre vote, I had to deal with Shearer regarding advertising matters for the BITU and placements for the JLP. Our mutual discomfort with one another was stark. I always felt that I was under a searchlight whenever I was around him. I think that he realised that I would never put my professional strength behind him if I were ever approached to do so, because I moved with some members of the noble fraternity I spoke of earlier: Tavares, Lightbourne, Ramsay, and so on. I detected that Shearer was not necessarily fond of them, a more 'enlightened' bunch who naturally bore the proclivity to lead.

More and more the questionable vote that gave him leadership awoke in my mind a kind of play that did indeed end up displaying itself in the final vote. I figured that if Shearer was a Busta bloodline, then nothing could prevent Busta from arranging the vote to look as if it were 'a close one' and then move to command Clem Tavares' best friend not to cast his ballot until he saw how the others voted. In my mind, it seemed that, if there was a tie between Tavares and Shearer, it would only be logical for us to discern that the 'one vote man' had the power to decide who would be Jamaica's next Prime Minister.