Foes No More... Retiring Opposition Leader Edward Seaga (left) shakes hands with Prime Minister PJ Patterson in Parliament yesterday after Seaga gave his final speech as an MP. (Photo: Joseph Wellington)

A dozen years ago he used the quip with devastating effect on colleagues who had challenged his leadership and had become estranged from the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP).
"Light a candle, sing a sankey and find your way back home," he advised at the time.

Yesterday, as some of those who were on the receiving end of that and others of his tart-tongued one-liners cheered and hailed his contribution to Jamaica, Edward Seaga jocularly turned the quip onto himself, to, in vintage Seaga fashion, bring the curtains down on a 43-year career in the House of Representatives and nearly a half-century in public life.

At 74, he was singing his sankey and finding his way into the career that he wanted as a young man after he had studied social anthropology at Harvard University and returned home to do research on folkways in Jamaica.

Edward Seaga is going to be an academic - a distinguished fellow at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies.

As he responded to the tributes on both sides of the Legislature, Seaga confessed his long-held ambition.
Said the retiring opposition leader: "I discovered an area and a type of life in Jamaica - that is, a life that needed to be the subject of greater study, and the subject of programmes and projects to help people . to move out of the category of "have nots" into "haves". I wanted to get back to that. I said to myself: 'When the university has its graduate school I will be back'. I would enrol. But, you never do. You get involved in politics, it absorbs you. Sucks you in. You can't move away. You can't give it up. Too many people depend on you.
". Therefore, I wasn't able to go back at that time to take the advanced degrees that I wanted.

"I don't have any intention of taking any advanced degree now. The offer that has been made supersedes that. But what I am doing is demonstrating that a good leader always does whatever he asks his followers to do, and so I will now light my candle, sing my sankey and go to my home."
The applause was rapturous.

It was a fitting climax to four hours of speeches in the House.
They ranged from Olivia "Babsy" Grange's emotional recollection of growing up in West Kingston, Seaga's constituency, under the wings of the man who became her party leader, to Prime Minister P J Patterson's assertion that Seaga's "quantitative and qualitative" innings will not be replicated.

Seaga has been the longest serving member of the House of Representatives ever, and, as Patterson said, has attended "about 2,000 sittings".

Patterson also observed that only Sir Alexander Bustamante, who founded the JLP, and Norman Manley, the founder of the ruling People's National Party, had led their parties longer. Seaga is bowing out after three decades.

In his time he has been praised and cursed: hailed in the 1970s for ostensibly wresting Jamaica from the grips of Marxism, demonised by the left as a fascist and accused by his own party in the 1990s of supposedly being an authoritarian leader.

There were none of those claims yesterday. People acknowledged differences, but there appeared to be genuine respect - for Seaga's wit, intellect, resolve and commitment to democracy.

". I think that especially when people are always knocking the parties and the political system, we must remind ourselves that, in Jamaica, political democracy has not only survived, but has grown in strength and deepened its roots largely through the efforts of the two political parties and the leadership which they have enjoyed in the period," Patterson said.

Despite periods of political turbulence, he noted, Jamaica has never succumbed to coups, military rule or genocide. Seaga had contributed to this.

It was incontrovertible, Patterson said, that Seaga was always a "fair and acute" political competitor" and no one could ever accuse him of lacking in "vim, vigour and vitality". That was a take on Seaga's campaign quip in the 2002 election campaign when, at the age of 72, he became a new father.

There was another public concession on the part of the prime minister. In 1983, his party boycotted the snap general election called by Seaga. The PNP claimed the voters register would disfranchise 150,000 new voters. The party was out of Parliament for nearly six years and Seaga effectively presided over a one-party Parliament.

"Even those who claimed that the prime minister had dictatorial powers, could never assert that during the period basic democratic rights and constitutional observances were violated in any way," he admitted.

A suggestion from JLP spokesman on finance, Audley Shaw, that the Government, the JLP, the University of the West Indies (UWI) and corporate Jamaica combine to establish a special library at Mona to be named for Seaga was also loudly applauded.

JLP general-secretary Karl Samuda, who once called Seaga a "little despot" who surrounded himself with "wimps, lackeys and yes men", sang another tune yesterday. He had left the JLP in the early 1990s and joined the PNP and was one of those Seaga had advised to sing a sankey. He has been back in the JLP since the mid-1990s.

Yesterday, Samuda described his relationship with the man he first met at the Myrtle Bank Hotel in 1963, as a somewhat "colourful" roller-coaster: "Sometimes up, sometimes down. Sometimes standstill and we move on again."

"But, I am happy to say and to announce to this Honourable House, that our relationship today has never been better," Samuda said.

Ed Bartlett patched up with Seaga early after the JLP fall-out of the early 1990s and in recent years has been one of the opposition leader's closest allies. Bartlett related how his political career got started when Seaga asked Pearnel Charles to recruit him after hearing a young Bartlett give a vote of thanks at Revere Bauxite company, Clarendon in 1973. Bartlett had only months before graduated from the UWI.

"I don't know what I moved, but I certainly heard, at the end, that he was moved," Bartlett recalled. He praised Seaga's commitment to freedom and democracy.

Peter Phillips, the national security minister and leader of Government Business in the House, was in no doubt that Seaga has been a "towering figure on the political stage".
For Derrick Smith, a JLP deputy leader and Leader of Opposition Business, Seaga was "the strongest human being I've ever met".

"In my 24 years serving with him in the JLP, I've seen many efforts to break his spirit, but none succeed," Smith said. "He has always remained focused. He never strays from his mission and he has learnt to accept ingratitude, even from those he has cherished the most.

"I believe it is his strength of character and his will to survive against great odds which have endeared him to all of us. This is the reason why, with all the efforts at demonising him and breaking his will, this country will, in the end, regard him as one of its really great heroes."

A tearful Olivia Grange personally thanked Seaga for showing the young people of West Kingston "that they did not have to condemn themselves to lives of crime and degradation, but that they could achieve their goals".

"Today, I consider myself, and the mayor of Kingston as two fine examples of his faith in us," Grange said.

Seaga's deep love and appreciation of people was what made Seaga so special to those he represented. "It is what made it so difficult for someone like me, who grew up in the midst of his West Kingston revolution, to say no when he asks for my support or when he charges me with a certain responsibility."

She challenged those who succeed him to seek to continue building on the foundation he has initiated.

Minister of Finance and Planning, Dr Omar Davies, recalled his long relationship with Seaga and the advice Seaga gave him over the years, including during the 1990s gas riot to 'be cool, this too will pass'.

He said that the country looked forward to Seaga's written reflections, not only on his years of service, "but, perhaps even more important, your views on the way forward".

Dr Kenneth Baugh, who is likely to succeed Seaga as interim leader of the Opposition, pending the resolution of the current leadership exercise, said that his experience as part of Seaga's Cabinet in the 1980s was "very instructive and exceedingly rewarding".

Minister of local government, community development and sport, Portia Simpson Miller, recalled her relationship with Seaga as a neighbouring member of parliament.

JLP MP Pearnel Charles recalled that Seaga refused to distribute hurricane relief, including zinc sheets, during the post-Hurricane Gilbert period in order not to use it for political advantage.

"I never found him to be a saint, or without some fault," said Charles, another colleague who has had a tempestuous relationship with his party leader. "He lived among men and shared their frailties, their dreams, their ambitions and their contradictions.

"But, there are virtues which he possesses beyond the measure of many of his contemporaries - his integrity, his ability, his courage."

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