Lisa Hanna’s Miss World triumph in 1993 will forever be celebrated as a seminal moment that lifted our nation.

Inspirational too, she did not fade away in the comfort of universal adoration, she extended her public service as a Member of Parliament and minister in successive People’s National Party (PNP) administrations.

Even more pointed, she has enriched our discourse with incisive articles on critical issues affecting our stuttering lift to modernity. Indeed, her unique achievement and admirable research invariably led me to refer to her as “a national treasure and an intelligent princess” in a 2020 Sunday Observer article, during the leadership contest with Mark Golding. My view remains unchanged.

Her Sunday Observer piece of June 25, 2023, however, is an affront to her usual on-point research. Detrimentally also, it’s an unworthy distortion of history specifically designed to influence the outcome of the recent South East St Ann candidate selection process, rendered unnecessary by Wavel Hinds’s graceful withdrawal.

The name itself speaks definitively to the overreach:

“The voice of SESA: Integral to the PNP and Jamaica”. In this she suggests that the voters of SESA (South East St Ann) have historically been the predominant voice of the PNP.

Borrowing much of her supporting ‘facts’ from Arnold Bertram, this position is uncannily arrived at via Norman Manley’s Jamaica Welfare with its initial pioneer club and farmers’ cooperative established at Walkerswood in the constituency. Further there is an attempt to link its democratic underpinnings to the recent selection impasse.

Unfortunately for Lisa, this bending of history to achieve a desired outcome is mired in numerous inaccuracies.

Firstly, Jamaica Welfare, though laudable, was essentially a social reform intervention devoid of any pretence at political change or democratic intent. It is an uncontested fact that Norman Manley, KC then, respectful of the monarchy, was resignedly comfortable with the socially benigned noblesse oblige objectives of Jamaica Welfare and twice rebuffed the vigorous entreaties of OT Fairclough to form a political party to enforce democratic and political change. So it is an historical fallacy to assign the party’s democratic or political instincts to the formation of Jamaica Welfare in 1936, prior to the birth of the PNP in 1938.

Secondly, it is unkind blasphemy to insert the PNP’s socialist founding on the establishment of Jamaica Welfare, funded by the one cent cess of the capitalist Zemurray’s United Fruit Company. History here is unvarnished; it was the 1938 worker uprising; Alexander Bustamante’s control of the political ground; Fairclough’s relentless pursuits to enlist Norman to the cause; AGS Coombs’s union agitation in the west; Ken Hill’s non-stop work to energise the national movement and enjoining Noel Nethersole in the formation of the National Reform Association, which roused Norman Manley from his privileged status that led to the founding of the PNP.

Thirdly, though unknown to Lisa, in an ironic twist, the formation of Jamaica Welfare while concretising Norman Manley’s embrace of the intelligencia, public servants and professionals to help deprived farmers and the poor, allowed Bustamante to consolidate his hold on the broad working class and underprivileged masses. The transition to a mass base party was delayed too long and not only led to Norman’s defeat by Doc Fagan and that of his party in 1944 but despite his personal victory in 1949, the PNP tasted defeat again.

Finally, the most searing indictment of Lisa’s missive is that the PNP’S success in SESA is intrinsically derived from the unbounded benevolence of Dr Ivan Stewart Lloyd and no other factor.

Long before the birth of the PNP, as medical officer of St Ann, Dr Lloyd stood in the breach during the cholera outbreak of the 1930s and gave sterling service towards its eradication. His innate caring and kindness reached its zenith in 1941, with the outbreak of the Yaws epidemic, where, along with his wife, he set up a makeshift clinic in the Claremont market, worked non-stop for 78 hours and cared for over 1,000 patients from the surrounding communities without charge. And the people never forgot his monumental kindness, electing Dr Lloyd to the Legislative Council, then the House of Representatives and Parliament under the banner of the PNP over six consecutive elections, retiring undefeated in 1969.

Thereafter, not even his own son Garland Lloyd, running for the Jamaica Labour Party, could break the PNP’s stranglehold up until today.

To attribute anything beyond Dr Lloyd’s goodness and by extension link SESA’s importance to the fortunes of the PNP, is to disrespect history.

Paul Buchanan is an executive member of the PNP and former Member of Parliament.