Dear Editor,

The headline “Sharon leaves PNP…” in your June 29 publication of the Observer reflected the sting of a bitter PNP. Ms Hay Webster is reported saying that this is not the PNP of Norman and Michael Manley. She has to be bitter, not because the party president did not see her, but because she is a victim of the biggest blunder of the PNP in recent times. She is right about the “cultism”, and her revelation about her neglected loyalty all substantiate the allegation made by another newspaper that the political parties are gangs: the leadership is beyond critique and when you are out, you are in the wilderness.

Ms Hay Webster did the right thing. Because of the poor leadership in the PNP a certain politician/lawyer initiated this “dual citizen crisis” and the “self-serving” leadership of the PNP followed blindly. They did not have a thorough inquiry into the matter, and as the saying goes, “the same knife that stick sheep, stick goat”. So Sharon is the victim of a blunder. They utterly rejected her but embraced the other who is in court for over $200 million, alleged to have been pocketed from the Cuban light bulb scandal. How correct is the talk about the strangeness of the PNP?

The leadership of the PNP has to be more than a “if dem tink seh dem badder dan me, tes’ me!” type of leadership. The PNP has gold, but the party has not been able to convert that gold into political capital. How lower can the JLP get and it is still standing tall? I write as a PNP sympathiser and I share with Ms Hay Webster this strangeness. This is the party of African liberation, anti-imperialism, and a party that has felt the pangs of the Americans and the CIA, especially in the last years of Michael Manley’s second term. I have a problem where the CIA and the Americans are concerned whether two leading members of the PNP would have survived the Opposition reshuffle. In the case of Dr Peter Phillips there have been serious talks about the MOU and changes written on the walls. Was it because of the secret MOUs that PJ Patterson refused to support Dr Phillips’s bid for leadership?

In the case of Dr Omar Davies, he was always applauded by the Americans and the IMF about how good a finance minister he was. I recall he could not take people saying, “Nutten nah gwaan” during the last regime. What is the interest of the Americans and their intelligence sector in having Dr Davies in the Shadow Cabinet? We must be reminded of a few things: it was under his stewardship that Paul Chen Young’s hotel was sold to the Americans and also the fact that an American real estate company had the “finsacked” properties to sell. It seems like we are between a rock and a hard place. This is a changed PNP, so changed that the party thinks that being quiet is a virtue. It has no plan and lacks reasonable ideas, just like a ship without its rudder in turbulent seas. Regional and other groups must put themselves on a path to recapture the PNP. The JLP is on a path of defeat, but can the PNP win? I leave you with this question: whom does the leadership of the PNP and the JLP serve?

Michael Norman W Clarke

Spanish Town

St Catherine