HIGH-RIDING Member of Parliament and medical practitioner, Dr Dayton Campbell is arming himself with a law degree that he hopes will make his political mountain much easier to climb.

Dr Campbell, MP for St Ann North West, is running the last leg of a three-year law distance learning degree programme offered by the University of London, and is set be certified by the middle of next year.

“I started the law degree just about the time when I was entering politics in 2011,” the ruling People’s National Party shining light told the Jamaica Observer in a midweek interview.

“The fact is that being a part of the Legislature has to do with the making or amending of laws and I thought that the law degree would be appropriate for a politician to have,” was his reason for enrolling in the distinguished university’s law school.

“Also, bearing in mind that I don”t have an executive position, I have a little additional time on my hands so I can further qualify myself to be able to contribute in a more meaningful way to politics,” the 30-year-old added.

Upon completion of his Bachelor of Law degree, Dr Campbell will become the only legislator qualified in both high-profile disciplines of medicine and law.

And he will not be leaving things at base level, as he intends to specialise in a particular area of law.

“I will be specialising in medical law, because I think with the medical background, if you balance the two by going to do the Master’s in medicine and law, I think I should be able to offer some expertise in the Ministry of Health, and even life after politics, because politics is unpredictable and persons have said it can be the most ungrateful profession, so I have to make sure that at all times I am in a position where I am still viable as an individual to take care of myself and my family,” he said.

Last week, Dr Campbell announced plans for a major education programme in the constituency that he manages, added to an ongoing project of medical assistance that he, among other doctors, offer to constituents.

The former president of the Jamaica Medical Doctors Association has positioned his political barometer in the direction of progress, and from early indications, the trade winds of success seem headed in his direction.

Politics, for him, has been tough so far, but he is prepared to be in it for the long haul, as long as he gets the support of his people.

“If the people keep voting for me, and I hope they do, I will be there for a while. Representing people is something I enjoy. It can be challenging at times, but there are things that you can find rewarding. When you see the few who appreciate what you do for them and how you have changed the lives for these persons, that is a rewarding component.

“The reception that I get in North West St Ann is good, but it is a very difficult job. There are a lot of issues, and persons expect you to solve them. If you lay out a plan to them, they don’t necessarily buy into the medium-term to long-term component. Most persons want to see improvement in their community instantaneously.

“A lot of people are in need of better roads, potable water, skills training, the education and health-care facilities that need to be developed. They all want it to happen at one time and you have to explain to them that it is a process … and will not happen overnight. We have made a lot of achievements and I do hope that we will be able to convey fully what the vision is for the constituency and that persons will buy into exactly what we have been trying to do,” he said.

The journey to political success is being fuelled by support from some of his parliamentary colleagues, among them Education Minister Ronald Thwaites, Local Government Minister Noel ‘Butch’ Arscott, and Minister of State for Transport, Works and Housing Richard Azan.

“I wouldn’t mind a little more support, to be honest, but I can’t say that I have not been supported. Persons have been encouraging, especially the minister of education — somebody whom I admire considerably. He has always answered my call. I never call on him to do anything and he doesn’t respond to it and respond with some amount of alacrity. Commendations are in order for him.

“Good relationships exist otherwise, and through those relationships we have been able to achieve some things. I do hope that we will be able to form other relationships and we can achieve more, because there are a lot of things that need to be done within the constituency. Some of them should have been done sometime ago, and it will not reflect well on me if at the end of my term they are still not done,” Dr Campbell stated.

The constituency has a five-pronged development plan, with education at the top, “because, personally I know the value of education, coming from where I have been coming from. I am only able to be where I am today because of education,” Dr Campbell stated.

“When I was young, my father said to me, ‘if you teach a man to fish, you will feed him for a lifetime, but if you give him a fish you will only feed him for a day’. That is something that rests well with me until this day, and that is what I have been trying to convey to the residents that whether it’s that they want to go into tertiary-level education, they want to go into skills training or whatever, they must educate themselves if they are going to make their families and themselves better,” Dr Campbell remarked.

Born in Bamboo in the constituency, the young Campbell attended the then Bamboo All-Age School, Ferncourt High School, Brown’s Town Community College, and later the University of the West Indies.

When he finished medical school, he went back to St Ann, did internship at St Ann’s Bay Hospital, served six months as senior house officer in orthopaedics (treatment of disorders and injuries of bones and muscles); went back to Kingston to work at the University Hospital of the West Indies’ (UHWI’s) Accident and Emergency Department; and later got into the ophthalmology programme to specialise in that area, when the call from PNP Chairman Robert Pickersgill came for him to enter representational politics.

“It was sudden. I didn’t have any history in politics before that, so it was something that was brand new to me. It’s a learning experience. I have made some mistakes, but I am wiser for some as well,” noted Dr Campbell.

Being hands-on sometimes has resulted in good returns for the first-time MP, who uses his personal achievements to try to lift the lifestyle of those who elected him to serve.

“There is a lot that one can achieve within a constituency, if you focus on the roles as member of parliament. My whole outlook on it is that I have looked at the issues in my constituency and I have tried to be my own minister of health down there, my own little minister of education, focusing on those issues, my own minister of youth, focusing on issues affecting young people.

“I have looked at the development plan for the constituency, coming out of the community consultations and I have been able to prioritise the issues. The focus is education. There is a similar focus on health care, because there is a mobile thing that we do on a Monday, we are still trying to get a mobile unit, but we go into the communities and on a Saturday we transform the MP’s office into a medical clinic and we see the residents down there for free.

“We sign them up for the NHF, JADEP, and based on my antecedents I have connections and I get samples from drug companies and they get their prescriptions signed. All of that is free.

“In the summer we do back-to-school medicals. In the two years we have done 2,560 back-to-school medicals free of charge. So there is a strong focus there,” he said.

Not wanting to give the impression that the focus is wholly on education and health care, Dr Campbell also took credit for repairing some roads, among them Knapdale to Sturge Town, Orange Hill to Lower Buxton, Philadelphia, Trysee, Minard Hill, Cardiff Hall, Back Hampstead, Mount Edgecombe, and Free Hill.

“We have plans in the next phase of the JEEP to do quite a few.

“There is also a $240-million project approved to re-lay pipes in Brown”s Town to address the issue of potable water delivery and efficiency to those residents, because a lot of those pipes are leaking.

“We have a lot of focus on employment. We have persons who assist farmers, because farming comprises 50 per cent of the employment in the constituency, 30 per cent is in the hotel industry and the other 20 per cent is from small businesses and civil servants. So farming is the lifeblood of the constituency. We have been assisting a lot of farmers with fertilisers, seeds, livestock initiatives. We have a revolving pig project that we are getting up and running, we assist them with poultry and feed as well. There is a housing development taking place, so persons are getting seasonal employment.

“About 46 young persons got job opportunities as merchandisers or within the hotel sector, and we have been able to send away a few of them in the restaurant industry or as technicians or truck drivers, in addition to the regular farm work that the Government does.

“We have the regular cricket, netball and football competitions as most MPs would,” the parliamentary backbencher said.

An Inter-secondary schools constituency competition in essay writing, project writing proposal and drama was held recently.

Among the tasks was to ask participants to submit proposals on the subject ‘If you were MP for a year, what project would you implement that would impact the lives of young people?

Dr Campbell is funding the project from his Constituency Development Fund and has decided to reward two schools which submitted proposals, and implement both projects.

The project proposals were for an inter-schools sports competition in court-based sports like basketball, netball and volleyball.

The second one is a values and attitudes programme.

“The values and attitudes programme is something that I have been doing some research on, because you would be surprised that a lot of the things that young people do, they don’t know better.

“It is not that some of them are trying to be rude, but they don’t know better. These things we need to incorporate in their curriculum, because school is where they spend most of their time and the fact is most of the parents don’t know better, so they can’t teach the children, and may not know how to conduct themselves appropriately, so we have to find a way to incorporate that into the curriculum.

“We will try to implement that first in the secondary schools and after that see if we can get it into the primary schools,” Dr Campbell said.