When a man is in his 20s the multiplicity of worlds he has to conquer are never enough.

Mid-way through his 30s it appears to him that the sheer number of them exceeds his imagination, but nevertheless, his limbs are no more weaker for the larger objective and his mental faculties are at their best in terms of the perfect balance with his physical side.

In his 40s he finds that it is not every battle that is worth fighting, and in fact the vast majority of them are unwinnable skirmishes. So he grows selective as life presents him with its harsher realities. In his 50s when crabbed age heads towards him faster than he can run away from it, he gains a truer understanding of the ways of the wolf and the powerlessness of the sheep. In that time he learns the strategy of selectively petting the wolf for the sole purpose of knowing what motivates it to grow fat on devouring so many powerless sheep.

In his 60s he will have morphed into a highly opinionated person and cynicism will always be within his easy grasp. The ways of the world, he will have gathered, are never fixed to support the objectives of 20-year-old idealists. Choices become increasingly narrow and as the bones ache and the brows become furrowed, any late burst of conquering the one real world left is tempered by a pragmatic assessment of what is workable and what is merely quixotic flurry.

In his 70s he is no less prone to zeal than the 20-year-old, but it lies mostly in wishing and hoping and his expertise in articulating pressing problems through the same mouth that remained shut when failure was given birth 50 years before. Plus, he listens mostly to the sound of his own voice. In his 80s he knows it all, listens to everyone, but believes nothing they say. If he is lucky to touch the 90s, the best pearl of wisdom that life can bestow on him is the realisation that the planet belongs mostly to starry-eyed 20-year-olds with numerous worlds to conquer and much disappointment to bear.

With politicians, the people in whom sizeable chunks of our immediate and long-term future are invested, this matter of age must be more focused. The irony is, as we increasingly transfer “servant of the people” to a realm of nothingness and accept that in reality politicians are our bosses, we give them more power to increase their tenure well beyond the time that is needed to transition new blood and innovative approaches to the hangovers of the old system.

On Monday I was invited to speak on the Breakfast Club about my column last Thursday, “Who will succeed Bruce Golding”. Troy Caine, political historian, also contributed.

Of the positions I took, the main one was that Prime Minister Bruce Golding was hoisted by his own petard, in that it was he who claimed that he had had a Damascus moment in 1995 and distanced himself from the stink of the politics he had seen while seated at the head table in the JLP. At that time he had also broad-brushed the PNP in similar involvement. To me he had a much greater responsibility in not just delivering quality leadership, but where specific issues bordered on sloth/corruption, the champion on this matter who we expected to see coming out swinging was none other than himself!

In criticising him, we were not slaying him because we wanted to be politically correct. We were simply calling him out on his own claims. Much to my surprise, my friend Troy said that Golding’s new and different image was only for the time when he was in the NDM. I am still trying to swallow that one.

The other position I took was that the “oldsters” in the Cabinet must put down their hampers, head for the “buttery” and stay home. To me, they have absorbed too much of the old ways of doing things in a country where the best approach from those who want to invest and do business is to pad one’s knees and prepare to genuflect endlessly before the politician in charge. Too much of their type of politics is tied up in “who comes first past the post takes all that is posted”.

Historian Caine was of the view that Audley Shaw is the ideal man to succeed Golding. I had deliberately omitted Shaw from my line-up to elicit responses. It is my view that over the next two years, short of some cosmic intervention, the stress of balancing the books will render Shaw politically sapped and defeated. If, however, he pulls it off there, he will be a front-runner, but in making Golding look good he will have longer to wait.

One reader wrote me the following, “Just read your article and like how you rationalise the choices. My choice for leader of the party is the new Bustamante – Robert “Bobby” Montague. He commands respect and attention wherever he goes, has mass support, is known internationally and is one of the best and brightest minds in the JLP. He is the best canvasser in the party and connects at street level. Has experience in administration, budgets, etc, and gets the job done.

“He is very practical and carries no political baggage like being associated with gunmen or dubious characters or being corrupt. Only drawback is he is not married (depending on the image the party wants to portray). All he has to do to become a deputy leader is ramp up some big money names behind him and the rest is history.”

Sounds easy, eh? In a country where substance must often take a back seat to style, the state minister with responsibility for Local Government Reform has taken flak for his all-too-often, in-your-face approach to failure in systems and personnel in the public service. In Jamaica where the level of the “diss” is more important than the fact that the person disrespected burned down the house, parochial assessments will always be made.

Party politics is a chess game within a game of chess. In a two-party system, the political fortunes of one party are inextricably tied to the fortunes of the other. Inside each party the political possibilities of young, bright, capable second-tier people like Bobby Montague are directly linked to the quality of the immediate and short-term deliveries of the leader of the party.

At present, the quality of the JLP’s governance is making the PNP look good, but for the PNP to move beyond just the usual sniping and launch focused, responsible agitation at the community level, while proposing specific alternatives, it needs to solve some practical problems like its internal debt and the ability of the party to attract funding under the present leader.

Over the last five years, Contractor General Greg Christie and his staff have been leading governmental authorities in the PNP and JLP towards a light that political oldsters are uncomfortable with. Their eyes have grown dim over too many decades of selective political myopia where the favoured grow fat and the losers jostle for space with the emaciated hogs at swill time. Dem fi go plant mint back a di kitchen an stay ’round deh!

observemark@gmail.com