Edward Seaga at 85
Edward Seaga was born May 28, 1930, which makes him 85 today. His impact on Jamaica was mainly in his political years, from the late 1950s to 2005 when he stepped down as leader of the Jamaica Labour Party. Edward Seaga’s 85th birthday comes at a time when the Jamaica Co-operative Credit Union League begins its annual convention. The two events are not totally irrelevant to each other.
Jamaica Welfare, which was founded by Norman Washington Manley, had much to do with the start of co-operatives in Jamaica. Credit unions and service co-operatives work together in umbrella co-operative societies. Both the service co-operatives, as founded by Jamaica Welfare and the Jamaica Agricultural Society on the one hand, and the credit unions on the other, were eventually registered under the Co-operative Act of 1950.
Edward Seaga put his twist on Jamaica Welfare (later Jamaica Social Welfare Commission) when he changed its name to Social Development Commission. It was the Jamaica Social Welfare Commission that implemented the first Youth Camp (Cobbla in Manchester) in 1955 when Norman Manley became premier. In the 1980s Edward Seaga, as prime minister, would expand the youth camp concept and rename it the HEART programme.
Many aspects of the HEART programme are laudable and to the credit of Seaga. But Orville and Wilbur Wright are still credited for the first aeroplane no matter how sophisticated they have become via the concepts of other people in later decades. So, too, we should remember that the HEART programme is really a set of glorified youth camps started by Norman Manley.
After the 1959 General Election, which the JLP lost, Seaga was appointed to the Legislative Council (forerunner of the Jamaican Senate). On April 10, 1962, Edward Seaga contested the West Kingston seat for the JLP and won by hundreds. For nine elections after that he would win by thousands, and in the later years several thousand. He would be MP for 43 years, a record not yet surpassed.
The 85 years of Edward Seaga, who was born in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, have been very interesting, especially of what we know about his adult life. The belief that Seaga grew up in the States is a falsehood; he was only born there, and nothing more. He attended Wolmer’s Boys’ School in Kingston and later went on to study sociology in general, and Revival and Pocomania that came to Jamaica from Africa. As a young man he was involved in the music industry.
Seaga was minister of development and welfare (1962-67) and set up the Jamaica Festival Commission. He was minister of finance and planning (1967-72) and established the Jamaica Stock Exchange; Opposition spokesman on finance 1972 to 1980, Opposition leader (1974-80 and 1989 to 2005); and prime minister and minister of finance (1980-89)
In a political broadcast in 1966, the then Opposition Leader Norman Manley said that it was he who secured the funds as premier of Jamaica for the building of the West Kingston housing scheme from then US President John F Kennedy in 1961. But the money was disbursed after the JLP came to power in 1962 and Seaga implemented the idea.
Is it true that before anyone could get a house in Tivoli Gardens they had to be ‘certified’ supporters of the JLP? Who expressed shock when the losing People’s National Party candidate for Tivoli Gardens in the 1969 local government elections gained as many as 355 votes? In later years, the PNP would also have their versions of garrisons.
Would it have been any different if the PNP had won power in 1962 and Norman Manley implemented the West Kingston housing scheme? What did Norman Manley mean when he said after he was reportedly shot at during a PNP motorcade in West Kingston in 1967 that “a new and dangerous thing had been unleashed in Jamaica”?
Was Edward Seaga a pawn for one side of the Cold War in its later years for those who did not like what Michael Manley was doing in Jamaica as he was ‘mashing up’ their profiteering ‘dolly-house’? For that matter, was Michael Manley a pawn in the 1970s for the other side of the Cold War in its later years? I am only asking questions here.
However, I am of the opinion that both major political parties should be blamed for the political violence that has taken place since 1938, but more so in the last nearly 53 years of political independence. Yes, I am a Norman Manleyist, but the PNP has very much moved away from much of what Norman Manley stood for.
For example, a government of the PNP is presiding over the Bank of Jamaica’s (BOJ) move to stifle credit union freedom with all sorts of regulations. I have indicated on many occasions that the Jamaica Co-operative Credit Union League needs a ‘wartime’ board that will confront the Government on what the BOJ is about to implement. What will the credit union league delegates do this weekend? For the last few decades, the credit union league board has seemed to be more interested in sipping cocktails with government officials.
The Roman Catholic Church, through the Young Men’s Sodality of the Holy Trinity Cathedral, implemented the early credit unions starting in 1941. Has the co-operative movement been hijacked by interests inimical to the poor for whom it was intended? Father Gerry McLaughlin insisted in a letter published in 1989 that there was a deliberate attempt to destroy the sugar co-operatives in the early 1980s. But the PNP seems also to have been hijacked by anti-co-operative interests.
Edward Seaga’s iron leadership style of the JLP played a role in the formation of the “gang of five” in 1990. This was when Seaga made his famous statement that the dissidents should “take up a candle, sing a sankey, and find their way back home”.
Edward Seaga has since lived to see the security forces’ operation in Tivoli Gardens in May 2010. I imagine that he is following the subsequent commission of enquiry with great interest.
ekrubm765@yahoo.com