Dr Peter Phillips has scoffed at the suggestion that the Opposition People’s National Party (PNP) should have focused on a much younger person to become its next president.

Dr Phillips, 67, will succeed outgoing party leader Portia Simpson Miller on March 26, when a Special Delegates Conference will confirm him by acclaim as the fifth president of the 78-year-old party.

That follows the decision by Simpson Miller, 71, to quit as party president on March 26, and also demit office as Leader of the Opposition effective April 2.

Dr Phillips was the only nominee for the post of president when the PNP’s nomination exercise closed on Friday, February 10, at the end of a five-day period.

“Those who become fixated on this idea are really missing the point,” Dr Phillips told the

Jamaica Observer during a wide-ranging interview last week at his New Kingston offices when the nomination procedure closed.

“For one thing, electorates in our country, for example, have elected young, and elected those not so young at various points in the history.

“They elected Michael Manley (former PNP president) as prime minister at 40-something; they elected him at 60-something also. Norman Manley (first PNP president and former chief minister) was first elected in his 60s and is still arguably the most distinguished of our political leaders.

“One thing that age does contribute is experience … the ability to know stability where it arises. The United States elected Barack Obama in his 40s, and in the next electoral cycle every candidate was over 70 and they elected one.

“What is significant is not this question of age, but what the person stands for … the policies, the programmes, the personal qualities of integrity and representativeness of the aspirations of the people and that’s how I am proceeding.“ Dr Phillips said.

Dr Phillips underlined that assuming the office as president of the PNP when the process is completed is not a prize to stand in of itself. Rather, he described it as “a call to work, to give service”, adding that it was out of a desire to give service, and not to seek reward, that he offered himself.

“When the time comes and one contests national elections and the issue of prime ministership comes up, it is all about service, not reward to the candidate leading the party. Indeed, it is a notion of vision that needs to be revived in the country, because democracy at its highest ideal is really about a population mobilised to exercise our civic responsibilities to govern ourselves.

“Most of us, or all of us here in the party and those outside, there is not one of us who has not been the beneficiary of Jamaica’s sacrifice — not our own sacrifice, Jamaica’s sacrifice for us.

“The taxpayers of the country financed my education. I got the opportunity to go to UWI (The University of the West Indies) because the taxpayers provided that. If it is even the pleasures of watching Usain Bolt and Elaine Thompson and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce run in the Olympics and feel the pulsing of the heart when you see the black, gold and green go up the flagpole and you feel the pride, and it is possible because of the fact of the Jamaican nation.

“When you hear Bob Marley music voted the music of the Millennium or you go on a street in Brazil and hear Jimmy Cliff pulsating, you know and you feel proud to say I am a Jamaican. And that very act of pride at least instils in me a sense that I have an obligation not only to the current generation but to the generations coming after, to create the conditions where they can experience that too,” said Phillips.

Prime Minister Andrew Holness, now 44, became Jamaica’s youngest political leader at age 38 when he succeeded then Prime Minister Bruce Golding as Leader of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) in October 2011. By December of that year he had led the JLP to defeat by the PNP in the general election, but regained power in the February 25, 2016 General Election when he led his party to a one-seat victory in the hotly contested national poll.