AT the time of his birth in 1939, George Lee’s future role as a leader was foretold by the village prophetess who also advised his parents to name him ‘Emmanuel’, meaning “leader of men”.

Could the old soothsayer of remote Bourbon in Portland, and Lee’s parents, who accepted her advice, have foreseen that 64 years hence, history would confirm this boy child as the first directly elected mayor of the municipality of Portmore?

Or better yet, that after party spoiler Keith Hinds had wrested from his grasp his historic hold on the job of mayor in 2007, that George Lee would rise again, like the Phoenix, out of the ashes of defeat in 2012?

Of course, Lee had become a leader of men long before that, writing his name in his country’s history through service to his compatriots and participation in far-reaching national events, like the 1964 JBC strike that signalled Michael Manley’s unstoppable rise to political prominence.

Lee’s dismissal from the now-defunct radio and television complex lit the fuse that sparked the famous strike. But his reward would be virtual starvation.

He fled his homeland and sought refuge in the United States for a time. It would take the resolve of a special branch policeman to help him get a passport after a two-year wait, because he had been dubbed a Communist.

But he used the opportunity while in the States to advocate on behalf of his compatriots living there and the records will show that the names of over 100,000 Jamaicans on a black list in the New York Police department were expunged because he stood up and fought it.

The years following included his eventful stint at the Agency for Public Information, previously and after that the Jamaica Information Service (JIS), during the tempestuous 1970s when the party he supported — the People’s National Party (PNP) — fought a torrid ideological battle with the conservative opposition Jamaica Labour Party.

After the general elections of 1980, he was forced to seek refuge in the US a second time, for his survival. When he returned home years later, it was to begin the long and tortuous campaign for city status for Portmore, which he called home. It is perhaps for this that men will most remember George Egbert Emmanuel Lee, who confesses to being his own man and not a party hack.

Lee, at one stage, believed that because of his independent stance, he was not well loved in the PNP. He remembered how some party members had bad-mouthed him out of the job as consul-general to New York when Michael Manley suggested him after winning the 1989 elections; and the bitter clash with Arnold “Scree” Bertram over the issue of Portmore city status.

In fact, his history-making run for first mayor of Portmore on a PNP ticket only happened because of a last-minute wooing of his candidacy by the party, after he had looked certain to win as an independent candidate.

So on June 2, 1939 when the old village ‘seer’ prophesied to Lolita and Egbert Lee — shopkeepers and leaders of sort in the community of Bourbon, Portland — that their newborn would be a leader of men, for some perhaps cosmic reason, they did not find the idea hard to accept.

Lee grew up in Bath, St Thomas, eventually becoming chairman of the world famous spa and mineral spring in the 1970s. After school at the Bath Primary and Windsor heights Secondary in east Kingston, he got his first job at the Public Works Department (now National Works Agency), followed by The Gleaner newspaper in the early 1960s.

He left for the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation (JBC) when it offered him “three times the Gleaner pay”. There he met top journalists like Hector Bernard, Claude Robinson, Consie Walters, Desmond Chambers, Keeble McFarlane and Hu Gentles, among others. Lee settled in quickly, but in less than a year’s time, he would find himself at the centre of great controversy at the JBC.

The PNP-affiliated National Workers Union (NWU) was in tough negotiations with the JBC board for a new wage pact, as Lee recalled it. Michael Manley was in charge of the union. An agreement was reached but while they were awaiting implementation, word came that the board had reversed its decision, saying it could not afford to pay.

“Adrian Rodway, a Guyanese who was the duty editor, told me to write a story for our newscast indicating that the Government had rejected the JBC’s offer. Next day we were called into an ‘Inquisition’ in which we were told that it was not the Government but the JBC that had turned down the offer. The board decided to get rid of Rodway and me,” Lee recounted. The staff decided to strike, the first middleclass strike in Jamaica, Lee recalled.

At the end of the strike, having decided not to remain at the JBC, Lee started looking for work. No one would hire him. He got some freelance assignments from The Gleaner under the name of the Englishman, “Peter Walker” but said his earlier decision to leave the paper had been used against hiring him full-time.

Managing Direcor SG Fletcher, Lee saId, had written him to remind him how he had been treated well at The Gleaner, got an unprecedented five raises in two years and still left the newspaper to join the JBC. He could forget about any contract with The Gleaner.

“I still have the letter which I have framed,” Lee can now joke about the matter.

But now Lee was in desperate financial straits. “For the first time I realised that I was without a penny to my name.”

With the encouragement of friends, he left for the US in the 1980s where his activism on behalf of his compatriots is well documented. Lee worked assiduously to return the PNP to power in Jamaica. That came in 1989. But it brought another cruel blow to Lee.

Manley suggested his name as consul-general to New York. Lee said some PNP colleagues began to do a job on him, saying he was a drinker, among other unfavourable things.

“By the time they were finished with me, my name had to be withdrawn,” he recalled.

With Manley back in power, Lee returned home in late 1990s. Thinking that he had proven himself a productive and valuable party man with all his hard work in the States, Lee tried to get back into the system. But nobody was taking him on. His stridency and independence were not forgotten.

He went to Portmore to cool his heels again and see what would turn up. Lee was feeling hard done by the party he had loved and served overseas and now this. But that night, from a grave in Bourbon, Portland where he was born, came a reminder on the wind that the old village soothsayer had prophesied he would be ‘Emmanuel’, a leader of men. It was time now for the prophecy to be completely fulfilled.

Portmore beckons

As Lee moved about Portmore — the sprawling dormitory community said to be the largest in the English-speaking Caribbean — it seemed so rudderless yet was growing rapidly without any semblance of order. He felt challenged. This was 1993.

Without any special plan, he went to a meeting of the Portmore Joint Citizens Association, affectionately called ‘the Joint’, to see what was happening. He was just returning from his farm in St Mary and his mind was preoccupied with plans to develop the farm. His thoughts were suddenly interrupted when he saw Maurice Garrison running from the meeting towards him.

Garrison, who published the Twin City Sun newspaper out of Portmore, told him “We need a man like you to run the Joint”. Lee was taken aback. He had not lived there long enough, he protested. But Garrison, now deceased, prevailed. By the end of the meeting, Lee was chairman of the Portmore Joint Citizens’ Association, winning the vote by a margin of one. “And so began my Portmore odyssey.”

Lee immediately got to work. He set up a Portmorewide Municipal Development Committee (PMDC) which began strenuous representation for amenities like light, water and telephones. Importantly, the PMDC spearheaded the long and tortuous negotiations for Portmore city status. Some of his key supporters were Carol McLean, Colin Fagan, Fitzgerald Smythe, Trevor Gayle and Leon Thomas, among several others.

Yet, the frustrations were many. People laughed at him, saying how could he expect to have two municipal councils in one parish — St Catherine.

“Had it not been for (then) Prime Minister PJ Patterson, I don’t know what would have happened,” he says. “At every juncture when we met upon a roadblock, it was he who smoothed the way.”

For example, Lee and Bertram collided when the then local government minister suggested that instead of city status, Portmore should have a committee representing it in the St Catherine Parish Council, says Lee. That was unacceptable to Portmore. Patterson stepped in and resolved the dispute in favour of Portmore.

Municipal status comes

Just before that, in 1997, Lee had stepped down as chairman of the Joint to run as a PNP candidate for the Greater Portmore North constituency in the 1998 local government elections. He won and took his seat in the St Catherine Parish Council. After his falling out with Bertram, Lee became ill and went to the States for a while to join his wife in Virginia. On a day when nothing much was happening, news came that the Government had formally made the announcement. Portmore would be granted municipal status.

Consequently, Portmore would have the first directly elected mayor. This was history and this was 1998. Lee’s telephone began to ring. Men told him he had to come home to complete his dream. He must come home and run for mayor of Portmore.

“I was in two minds about it. But in the end, I decided to come home,” said Lee. He called a meeting of a wide cross-section of the citizenry to test their resolve and determine that they really wanted him to run. He got his answer from the meeting, a resounding ‘yes’.

But Colin Fagan, a man with whom he had fought side by side for municipal status also wanted to run. When Lee weighed the matter, he felt he had a duty to run and the race was on. Fagan got the nod to run on the PNP ticket and Lee decided he would go it as an independent. “Happily, the matter was resolved and I ran under the PNP banner,” he said.

Mayor of Portmore

In June 2003, at 64 years old, Lee won the mayoral elections over two other candidates, becoming the first directly elected mayor in Jamaica. On election night, Lee felt a wave of relief and gratification sweeping over him. He had come to the end of the long and winding road to Portmore municipality.

Lee has since been of the view that every mayor should be directly elected, saying that he felt much less of the political party pressure that other mayors feel.

“Because of this I am able to rise above partisan politics and that is why we have very little political friction in the Portmore Municipal Council,” he said of his first term. “The old time politics can’t help Jamaica now. We have to offer a different type of leadership.”

But Lee would admit that he sometimes felt he had been given basket to carry water. The level of resources he had expected after the euphoria, had never materialised.

“But we are determined and we will continue fighting and working,” he declared.

After his loss to Hinds in 2007, Lee could not get the mayoral blood out of his system. He would run again. On March 26, 2012, the voters of the Portmore municipality decided they wanted him back!

Perhaps now the old village ‘seer’ of Bourbon, Portland can rest at last, her prophecy now being completely fulfilled. George Egbert Emmanuel Lee is a leader of men.

Lee is married to fellow Portmore activist Aneita, formerly Chambers, and they have a daughter, Claudette Lee and two stepsons, Rojah and Andrew Teck.