SATURDAY October 30, 2010 will mark 30 years since the general election of 1980. After nine months of violence, some 800 people were killed due to politics. In that election, the Jamaica Labour Party, led by Edward Seaga, won a landslide victory. The JLP gained 51 of the 60 seats in the House of Representatives and almost 59 per cent of the vote, defeating the People’s National Party government led by Michael Manley who had been prime minister from 1972.

There were three significant events that led to the turmoil in 1980. First, there was the international oil crisis that started in December 1973. And from that time until today there have been attempts to find alternative energy. It did not begin three days ago when former US President Bill Clinton spoke on the subject at the Jamaica Pegasus. But every time the price of oil dropped on the world market we also dropped our search for alternative sources of energy.

Second, there was the announcement of the intended construction of a Democratic Socialist State in October 1974. Third, there was intensified violence and food shortages that had the appearance of attempts at destabilisation. No one has produced evidence as to who destabilised Jamaica in the 1970s. Michael Manley, however, quoted from a page of a United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) manual in Struggle in the Periphery.

And what was described there was very similar to what was happening in Jamaica such as the food shortages and the violence. It was clear that the US government was uncomfortable with Manley’s trade arrangements with Cuba and the Soviet Union while the Cold War was still on. Even junior minister Roy McGann was shot and killed some 10 hours before nominations were to open for the 1980 election.

While it is true that the PNP, which was founded in 1938, declared itself socialist in 1940, many times in the PNP’s history the socialist doctrine was shelved. Michael Manley wrote in Struggle in the Periphery that “the PNP has always been socialist in the sense that it never said it was not”. And in the year 1974, two years after winning power in 1972, the PNP took socialism off the shelf.

As the PNP government of the 1970s took on a socialist appearance, the white and brown-skinned upper-class Jamaicans who had not yet migrated panicked once again. The paranoia started after the Haitian Revolution in 1804 when hundreds of Haitians migrated to Jamaica. And there was great alarm after the “Sam Sharpe Rebellion” of 1831 and even greater panic after the Morant Bay Rebellion in 1865.

As late as 1996 there was a hullabaloo when then Father (now the Honourable Monsignor) Gregory Ramkissoon brought the US Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan to Jamaica to give a public lecture to raise funds for the Mustard Seed Foundation. I then wrote in my column in the now defunct Jamaica Record that in the 1970s many people migrated after Michael Manley said that if anyone did not like socialism, there were “five flights a day to Miami”.

But Michael Manley responded to me. In a letter, he said that the heavy migration of the upper classes in the 1970s started before the “five flights” speech. According to Manley, this heavy migration started when he ruled that the people were to pay land tax according to acreage, and not one land tax regardless of the size of their land.

Michael Manley’s decision to go to the International Monetary Fund in 1978 brought severe hardships. All over Jamaica it was seen in graffiti – “Is Manley Fault” as alternative initials for IMF. Michael Manley announced on February 3, 1980 that as soon as the voters’ list was ready, he would be calling fresh elections. The voters’ list took eight months to be ready and the violence intensified.

Later in 1980, the Michael Manley government cancelled the IMF agreement after an all-night meeting of the PNP National Executive Council.This brought even more hardships as there was even less money of real value. The JLP started their election campaign in May 1980. Their slogans were “Deliverance is near” and “Money will jingle in your pocket”. The JLP’s catchy campaign song “Palms of victory, bells of freedom” was combined with a communist smear campaign on the PNP and aided by lengthy lines for scarce food.

The near passage of Hurricane Allen in August 1980 which blew down thousands of banana trees meant that there were no bananas to eat and rice was unavailable. This was also to the JLP’s advantage. So the JLP won a massive victory on October 30, 1980 and Edward Seaga was sworn in as prime minister on November 1, 1980.

After the 1980 election, many thought the JLP would be in power forever. But in February 1989 the PNP returned to power and they shelved socialism once again. After 18 years of PNP rule, the JLP narrowly returned to power in 2007 and Bruce Golding was sworn in as prime minister. The rest, as they say, is history.

ekrubm765@yahoo.com