Norman Manley speaks from the grave through Brian Meeks

UWI professor says 1944 pact has failed

by Garfield Myers Editor-at-Large, South/Central Bureau

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Mandeville, Manchester - He is probably at risk of being dismissed as an outdated 1970s idealist, if not Socialist.

However, convinced that Jamaica's social, political and economic arrangements of the last 66 years have failed, University of the West Indies (UWI) professor of Social and Political Change, Brian Meeks, is urging comprehensive land reform, and a "deepening" of democracy by engaging Jamaicans at home and abroad.

Meeks believes that the Jamaican experience of the last three decades involving "the breakdown of commonly held notions of law, of ethics, of manners, of order and ultimately of the meaning and purposes" of nationhood, is proof that the unwritten "pact" which came with Universal Adult Suffrage in 1944 no longer works.

"This 'pact of 1944', as I call it, was never written down, though it was as substantial as if it had been forged in cement," Meeks told his audience at the July 4 commemoration of the 117th anniversary of National Hero Norman Washington Manley at the hero's birthplace in Roxborough, Manchester.

"This was an arrangement in which the vast majority of the Jamaican people gave their allegiance to one of the two dominant political parties at election time, in exchange for tangible benefits," he said.

Meeks claimed that in the first three decades of the pact, "it worked reasonably well, with a vibrant and exclusivist two-party system developing alongside clear social and material benefits for the majority of the population".

However, he said, by the 1960s, "the pact - already flawed because of its tendency to amplify inequalities - was further compromised as the world economy began to move out of the boom phase that had characterised it in the first decades after World War Two".

For Jamaicans, the drastic reduction in opportunities to travel to Britain to help rebuild that war-ravaged country heightened "unemployment and misery" in Kingston and other urban areas.

By the 1970s, said Meeks, it had become apparent that "without a fundamental revision of the social and political arrangements of the previous 30 years, there was likely to be severe social disruption.

"This was the context of the Michael Manley Government of the 1970s," that sought to revise the "social pact" in the attempt at Democratic Socialism, he said.

He argued that the defeat of Manley's Democratic Socialism in 1980 "heralded the beginning of a long political night, which continues into the present..."

"Summarized simply, since the decadence and dissolution of the old arrangements - the pact of 1944 - no new coherent and compelling set of arrangements have emerged to reintegrate the vast majority of citizens into a common polity with an overarching set of common beliefs," Meeks complained.

The answer, he suggested, was to once and for all accept the 1960s advice of Norman Manley for Jamaicans to utilise political power in social and economic transformation.

As an economic imperative, Meeks advocated far-reaching land reform, the absence of which, he said, had triggered mass migration to urban areas with horrendous repercussions such as chronic unemployment and the creation of criminal dons and fiefdoms.

Meeks, who was speaking prior to last week's announcement of Government's plans to sell and lease the remainder of the publicly owned sugar industry - inclusive of 18,000 hectares of sugar lands - to Chinese company Complant, said the nation should consider the divestment of "a significant part of its fertile sugar 'bottom' lands to the citizens of rural Jamaica".

That initiative, he said, should be "based on principles of transparency, equity and the continued employment of the land in agricultural production".

He suggested that such an approach "would not only address the structural inequalities of the last 200 years, but could potentially release a wellspring of hidden collateral wealth and empower rural Jamaicans".

"It would be very close to the successful models employed by South Korea, Taiwan and Japan...that released rural wealth and allowed urban economic development to proceed at a pace, he noted.

Meeks conceded: "There are many pitfalls to such an approach." But he believed "that we have exhausted most of our other options".

"At any rate, no strategy of development, whether based on services, tourism, sports, entertainment or even (though unlikely) industry, can proceed without a determined attempt to end rural poverty, which will undermine everything else if it is not addressed," he said.

Twinned to the land reform programme, should be an effort to involve the mass of the people in decision-making and democratic action, he said.

He suggested that current efforts at better anti-corruption legislation, stronger crime-fighting laws and decades-old discussions about greater checks and balances in governance were all to the good.

But, "Most importantly," he believed, "we should consider the convening of a Constituent Assembly of the Jamaican People at home and abroad..."

"No strategy," Meeks argued, "...should be allowed to proceed without a conscious attempt to convene the Jamaican people and consult with them as to the future of the nation."

A failure, in the building of modern Jamaica, he said, was that ordinary Jamaicans were not involved in the development of the Constitution.

"True, there had been raging debate from the 1940s, much of it generated by Norman Manley and the PNP...Yet the final document was never signed and sealed by the Jamaican people. This historical oversight needed to be corrected.

"A Constituent Assembly of the Jamaican People at home and abroad would not be a single event, but a series of debates and encounters that would sample the opinion of people on a wide variety of Constitutional matters, rights, economic and social directions and, last but not least, values.

"There is an entire cohort of young people, now approaching maturity, which has grown up without the values, ethical standards and guidance of parents, family, mentors and community. A conversation surrounding values and ethics that would discuss the very ideas of right and wrong and why they are of value would be a central feature of the Constituent Assembly.

"It would ideally establish consensus around a wide range of broad matters that would not tie successive governments to any single set of policies, but would provide a compass and guide around which all Jamaicans could unite. It would be the worthy successor to the pact of 1944 and would allow the nation to proceed deep into the 21st Century with a clear sense of direction and purpose.

"Without such a process, associated with a deepening democracy and an inclusion of the entire family of Jamaica within its ambit, the future is likely to be a futile and disastrous one of trying to navigate the rocky waters of globalisation, without a compass, a rudder or a captain," said Meeks.

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