Delano Franklyn: His life belonged not to him but to his country
Today we reprint the second of a two-part interview with Delano Franklyn, attorney-at-law, which was published in September 2004. Franklyn, a former minister of state and political activist, died of cancer of the blood on Friday, February 10, 2023.
Jamaicans can be quite ambivalent about people in leadership, often loving and despising them at one and the same time. Then there is the sentiment that one must not declare leadership intentions, but should wait until called… by some unknown event or at a time to be accidentally scheduled. In other words, a heavy dose of cynicism would greet any such declaration, unless in very defined circumstances, such as a clear vacancy.
Delano Roosevelt Franklyn has never declared or described himself as a leader. But trace his life and see the relentless course leading to the inevitable. From the first occasion when students in his fifth form at Kingston College (KC) backed him for Students Council representative, through Mico Teachers’ College and the University of the West Indies, he was always prevailed upon to lead. Surely, he could have said ‘no’, but in a way the decision was probably not his to make. And now as a senator and minister of government, it is too late, it seems, for him to say ‘let this cup pass from me’.
Bright, astute, mentally agile and energetic, clean-shaven and with clean hands, Franklyn presents a picture of a young Jamaican patriot whose life no longer belongs to him but to his country. And wherever service of his compatriots will take him, he appears ready to go.
The PNP, the party of the people
Back in fifth form at KC, the way forward did not seem this clear. He had performed so poorly in end-of-year exams, on account of spending all his time with the work as president of the National Secondary Students Council (NSSC), that he was forced to repeat fifth form. His parents were anguished and desperate that he must end this flirtation with this thing which, to his mother, was akin to trade union work. He felt himself in a quandary. This is what he wanted to do, serve his fellow students, but he also knew that his parents were right.
If Franklyn needed a final push, he got it when he saw that all his close schoolmates from fifth form had been promoted to sixth form. He accepted re-election as president of the NSSC, but this time, spent much more time with his books and sailed into sixth form after exams, noting that he enjoyed a respectful relationship with new principal John McNab who had taken over from Carlton Bruce who acted for a while after Rev Don Taylor left KC in controversial circumstances.
Now in upper school, he began to look at national politics. He formed the view that the People’s National Party (PNP) was, at the time, and traditionally, “the party best representing the desire of the people”. All of that was linked to the party’s policies such as free education and student support through free lunches, uniform and academic material. The Government spent a lot of time building secondary education. Franklyn found the whole thing very attractive.
During the two years of sixth form, Franklyn, as head of the NSSC, had worked closely with the Jamaica Union of Tertiary Students (JUTS), with both operating out of a common unit in the Ministry of Education. When he finished ‘A’ Levels, JUTS asked him to take up a paid position as administrative assistant to the organisation and he decided he would take a break from school. Shortly after, he became the general secretary. This was possible because the JUTS constitution allowed a non-tertiary student to hold the position. All this while still being president of the NSSC.
Jimmy Carnegie and the dreadlocksed twins
As he had done with the NSSC, he visited all the tertiary institutions and was struck by the fact that the students were more mature than those in the NSSC, and far more prepared to stand up for what they thought was right.
There was the GC Foster College incident, for example, when the principal, Jimmy Carnegie, now the noted sports journalist, suspended the Haughton brothers, a pair of Rastafarian twins, because they wore dreadlocks. The student body was up in arms. Franklyn met with Carnegie, who was adamant that locks should not be worn to school and declared that it was either him or the Haughton brothers.
Franklyn wanted an amicable solution and he thought long and hard about the matter. Carnegie was a respectable man who believed in his position. He was upholding a longstanding sentiment among older Jamaicans and seemed to be in a do-or-die mood. He knew it would be difficult to get the principal to budge. He also knew that in such matters, if you were not prepared to cover all the angles, the administration “would leave you flat-footed and out-manoeuvred”.
So, in preparation for his meeting with Carnegie, he read the Education Act, the Code and the Regulations. Then bingo! He found a circular from the Ministry of Education that left no doubt, that no student should be deprived of an education because of his/her religion.
This was the late 1970s. It was a time when activist organisations all over the country were making their voices heard through the mass media, in the ideological ferment that was Jamaican society. JUTS issued a news release outlining the findings of Franklyn’s research as it related to the Haughton twins. The following day when he turned up for the meeting, it was to hear that Carnegie had resigned and the Haughtons had been reinstated! Franklyn had won big time, but as he prepared to celebrate, he felt the long arm of the law suddenly closing around him.
Demons of J’can politics
The entire student population had gathered in the GC Foster auditorium. Franklyn began to address them about the victorious conclusion to the case of the Haughton twins. “Suddenly, I was lifted off my feet. When I looked around, it was a contingent of policemen. They took me off the platform and told me they were called and informed that we did not have permission to address the students. We left amicably.” Franklyn did not know it then, but within a few months the innocence of school politics would be over. The demons of Jamaican politics were about to be unleashed on him.
In 1980, the Government changed hands as Edward Seaga’s Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) trounced Michael Manley’s PNP. A new education minister in Dr Mavis Gilmour was appointed. According to Franklyn, the first thing Gilmour did was to instruct that he be fired. Then all the furniture was moved out and the JUTS/NSSC office closed. The two entities made a cause celebre of the matter and in the face of their agitation, the ministry decided to relocate the office to one of the back buildings. It was clear though that the support of the Government for the NSSC and JUTS could no longer be counted on.
“It was a cruel blow to the fact that students had come into their own rights and had been able to make decisions in matters that affected them,” he says in retrospect.
At that time, JUTS had become a member of the International Union of Students (IUS) based in Prague, capital of then Czechoslovakia. Most of the international tertiary organisations in the world were members. With IUS assistance, the period of the early 80s was used to restructure JUTS now in a survival mode. The IUS organised many meetings throughout the Caribbean, with the focus being on uniting students.
Between the end of his KC days and this period, Franklyn collaborated with many other youth activists, mainly in the PNP and the Trevor Munroe-led Marxist-Leninist Workers’ Party of Jamaica (WPJ). He met and collaborated with people like Paul Burke; Audrey Budhai; Sheldon McDonald; Norris McDonald; Lorenzo Ellis; Leroy Rennie; Raymond Green; Robert Kerr; Rhema Kerr; Dennis Smith and so on.
There came a point when the young activists were ideologically torn between the left-of-centre PNP and the leftist WPJ. Franklyn wanted to see a push for more social policies benefiting the underprivileged. “When I compared what I wanted to see and what the two parties represented, I opted to join the WPJ,” he explains. But his troubles had only just begun.
Detained in a cold, dark cell
What Franklyn describes as a period of witch-hunting began. His home was raided by police as his mother watched in fear and trembling. He was detained for three days at Central Police Station in downtown Kingston, recalling that it was the young lawyers Jacqueline Samuels-Brown and Richard Brown who came to represent him.
Behind bars at the police lock-up, Franklyn had much time to think. He had not long before completed high school and asked himself what was it that he was doing wrong that he should find himself in a cold, dark cell that had temporarily housed, among its inmates, some desperately murderous souls. Worse, he was concerned for his mother who had taken the thing badly.
Yet, as far as he could see, he had only been involved in social engagement, organising and operating within the confines of the law and the constitution of the country he loved. It was for this that he was detained. How could that be wrong? As a heavy cell door banged shut next to his and a key turned with an eerie sound of finality, he stiffened his resolve to continue in the political struggle.
At Central Police lock-up…again
The jailhouse reflection also demonstrated to Franklyn how lonely the political road could be. “Many of the people you thought of as friends were not there for you,” he remembers. “You were on your own and it taught me that nobody else would bear the consequences of your action.” Still he decided to continue his political work, seeing his detention as “people disagreeing with my position and denying me of my rights”. As mothers are wont to do, Mrs Franklin pleaded and lectured about the wastefulness of his course. But he was undaunted. And more peril loomed.
The following year, the Jamaican Government decided to host an international youth conference that excluded organisations whose views were not deemed compatible with the organisers. Among the casualties was the youth arm of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC). Insisting that Jamaica had always supported the ANC in its struggle against the racist apartheid system in South Africa, several left-leaning youth organisations here — including the PNPYO, the Young Communist League, JUTS and the NSSC — opposed the Government on the decision. They were ignored.
On opening day of the conference, protesters — among them Franklyn — demonstrated outside the Jamaica Conference Centre in downtown Kingston. Police swooped down on the demonstrators and dispersed them with teargas. Several of the ringleaders were detained. For the second time in as many years Franklyn found himself behind bars at Central Police Station lockup, though for only a day in this case.
In that wretched cell, he once again contemplated the struggle he had been engaged in and pondered the future. Was it time to quit? He honestly believed that the ANC’s quest for freedom was just and that the demonstration was morally correct. Yet again, he firmed up his resolve to continue.
About the same time, a decision was taken by Gilmour to close Jamaica School of Agriculture (JSA) in Twickenham Park, in breach, Franklyn says, of the Act governing the school. The law was repealed a few days after the closure decision. Franklyn was again summoned to the struggle. However, all opposition to the move was ignored by the Government and the JSA died an ignoble death.
The political left in retreat
The first half of the 1980s was extremely rocky for Franklyn, and the left in general, he recalls. There was much pressure and intimidation and many succumbed to the grit and might of the State. But he became even more resolute.
“I thought what was important was not to change my views about the disparities in our society. It was clear to me that the Government of the 1980s was not a Government of the people, because of the experience of turning back all that had been done in the 1970s to educate youth and students and for national development; as well as the persecution of the youth and student leaders.”
As the left retreated, Franklyn toned down his activities and decided he would pursue tertiary education at Mico Teachers’ College. He had resolved in his mind that he would live on campus and throw himself into the two-year course and nothing else.
By this time his reputation had preceded him. During the first week, Mico Principal Renford Shirley, whom he describes as “a great man”, invited him to a meeting and outlined his expectations of him while he sojourned there. In an amicable way, Shirley hinted he did not expect to see the college embroiled in public conflict. Franklyn assured him he planned to live almost in the library. Or so he thought.
Come time for elections to Mico Students’ Association (MSA), students — led by Howard Barrett who knew of Franklyn’s NSSC and JUTS past — urged him to run. This time he resisted, telling them he had been out of the formal school system for too long and wanted to get on with his studies. But they prevailed upon him.
In preparing to run, he researched the long and prestigious history of the 148-year-old Mico, the oldest teacher-training institution in the western hemisphere. He found that the bulk of the leadership of Jamaica’s social and community organisations had at one time or another been at Mico, “the poor man’s university”. Among the names were Howard Cooke, now governor-general, Ambassador Dudley Thompson, Professor Neville Ying and Claude Packer, the current Mico principal.
At the end of his first academic year in 1985, he contested the post of MSA vice-president and won. A year later, he was elected president. The plan to remain quiet at Mico was shelved. Once again, he became fully engaged in student activism. But he decided he would not make the same mistake he made at KC, reasoning to himself that his own success in academic performance, or lack of it, could either turn on or turn off some people he must lead. The ‘A’s in his final year exams testify to his achievements.
But before that, Franklyn would have one big test that threatened to derail his academic pursuits.
The struggle against the cess
Education Minister Gilmour announced, on February 18, 1986, the introduction of a 30 per cent cess on fees for students at UWI and CAST, now UTech. The proposal set off a firestorm. Students of the poor might not now be able to go to university, the critics argued. This had implications well beyond UWI and CAST.
Franklyn, then VP of MSA, became involved, giving his support to the president of the UWI Guild of Undergraduates, Lawrence Jackson, popularly known as ‘X’. They formed a National Students Committee to fight the cess, pulling in Shortwood Teachers’ College and the Jamaica School of Arts, Drama and Music, as well. Among those who stood out for him was Wayne Robinson, the student they called “Crime Stop” and who now heads Quality Academics. Together they locked down the university.
As Franklyn was making his way to a student protest in Papine he was met by some students at Liguanea who told him that some of their leaders had been detained by police who were waiting for him. He entered CAST through a back gate and then locked the front gate, preventing the police from coming in. He climbed onto a big column within the gates and addressed the students. At the end of his address, Franklyn led a group of students to Half-Way-Tree Police Station to seek bail for the detained student leaders.
With UWI and CAST crippled, Prime Minister Seaga called the committee to a meeting where he was supported by Gilmour, central bank governor Headley Brown, and Olivia ‘Babsy’ Grange of the Office of the Prime Minister. The meeting lasted 15 minutes. Seaga listened and at the end said he would think about their submission and left. Shortly after, he announced the Phillip Sherlock Committee comprising Rev Dr Dudley Stokes, Vivian Rochester and Silburn Reid to look into and advise him on the cess.
Sherlock’s board recommended a 15 per cent cess to be phased in over three years and to be reviewed after three years. Importantly too, it ruled against a companion proposal to end boarding grants. Franklyn and the others felt they had won a major victory.
Closing the chapter on the WPJ
Despite the victories while at Mico, Franklyn was becoming increasingly pensive, his days filled with reflection and contemplation. Mentally, he was growing apart from his fellow WPJ members and the Marxist-Leninist ideology. How could they not see that this was not the thing for Jamaica, he thought to himself.
In the first place, the party was too ideologically focused on class separation, ignoring the fact that Jamaican society was more about race, social disparities and what he terms “existentialism” — the preoccupation with living and surviving. Because of its focus on class, the WPJ paid more attention to Lenin than to Marcus Garvey and to what was happening in the United States over what was happening in Jamaica.
More over, the Jamaican people were too free-spirited to accept any system that was too rigidly controlled and highly centralised, Franklyn reasoned. They needed a vision that was rooted in Jamaica’s historical development and couldn’t identify with anything that was foreign.
He had also come to the momentous conclusion that Jamaica was too small for the talent which exists in all spheres to be splintered across parties of different ideological strains. This was 1985. Franklyn was on his way out of the WPJ. A tumultuous chapter in his life had come to a close. And a new one was opened in 1991 with his successful application to join the PNP which fit all the notions he had of a party that Jamaica needed.
After Mico, he went straight to UWI on September 7, 1987, the same day he started a full-time job as a sales representative at Bartley Ewart’s Tanners group for which he travelled all over the country. He enrolled for a degree in History and Politics, swearing that this time he would have nothing to do with student leadership at UWI… Until he was approached by a group of students who persuaded him to run for vice-president of the Guild in 1988. The following year he was elected president, took a student loan buttressed by support from his mother and siblings and resigned from Tanners to focus on his studies. At different times he had on his executive media people like Winston Witter, Neville Graham and Grace Virtue.
His administrations would be known for financial probity, important because of previous claims of impropriety in the handling of guild money. His was the first in long time to leave a surplus. It was also noteworthy for the publication of a campus newspaper, The Beat with people such as Colin Steer, Francine Alexander and Bryan Cummings.
He proposed the formation of a presidential group comprising the presidents of the guilds on all three campuses — Mona, Jamaica; Cave Hill, Barbados; and St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago — to co-ordinate student activities with common goals.
To Cave Hill and back
With an honours degree under his belt, Franklyn graduated in 1990 and went straight to the Faculty of Law. As president of the guild, he assisted in fashioning the semesterisation programme which replaced the old term structure. In 1991, he went to the Cave Hill campus to pursue law. It was déjà vu.
In his fifth week there, guild elections came up and a group of students who had heard of him from the presidential committee invited him to run. In any event, half of the 140 students in the law faculty were Jamaicans. All plans for a quiet time watching community cricket and following Barbados politics while he studied went out the window. As before, he was elected vice-president in 1991 and then president a year later.
At Cave Hill, life was fairly uneventful and he returned home in 1993 to complete his law degree at Norman Manley Law School. And to more action. A cess of $40,000 was imposed on students there and yet again, there was serious agitation. This was now the PNP Government which had won the election in 1989, promising to drop the cess “the minute” they had come to office. Franklyn was a member of the team that went to Justice Minister David Coore to appeal the cess. It was agreed that the Government would absorb the $40,000 but the students would be bonded and the money deducted from salaries.
As fate would have it, six years later the tables were turned in a way. When a group of university students marched on Jamaica House during the gas riots of 1999 it was Franklyn, in his job as chief advisor to Prime Minister PJ Patterson, who met them and negotiated a delegation to see Patterson.
Tragedy at Camp Cape Clear
Franklyn completed law school and decided he wanted to be engaged in wider social matters, instead of going right away into legal practice. During this time, he did a freelance stint with the still newly established Jamaica Observer newspaper. Then history caught up with him. Prime Minister Patterson had decided to reintroduce the National Youth Service (NYS). Franklyn had applauded when Manley first established the NYS 21 years earlier. It was scrapped by the Seaga Government in the 1980s.
Patterson offered Franklyn the job to run it, he having been part of the team which did the feasibility study on resuscitating the NYS in 1995. He remained there for two years, during which the service took in 12,000 youths between 17 and 24 years old, from across Jamaica. So hands-on was he that he personally met and spoke with all 12,000 participants, forming the impression, he says, that the vast majority of Jamaican youths were disciplined, hard-working, willing to contribute if given a chance and not to be written off despite the few who some say are irredeemable.
This impression was severely tested on the first night of Camp Cape Clear in St Mary, a month after the NYS was brought back. Franklyn had given his pep talk to the participants at orientation during the day and had just got back to Kingston about 11:00 pm when he got a frantic call from the centre manager. One inner-city youth had stabbed another to death in his sleep, following an altercation earlier in the day.
Franklyn himself broke the dreadful news to the dead youth’s mother. When the killer was caught two days later by police, he told the NYS director after much prodding that the deceased had “dissed me in front of others”. The incident confirmed to Franklyn how really critical was the NYS’ function of re-socialisation of the youth.
In 1998 Franklyn was invited by Patterson to co-ordinate his support staff in the role known as chief advisor to the PM, giving him the opportunity to interface with key people at the echelons of economic, business, political, social, spiritual, cultural and community leadership. To him fell the task of ensuring that the prime minister was able to have a manageable schedule on a day-to-day basis, while addressing critical matters in his capacity as head of government.
For this reason, Franklyn has been rolling in sackcloth and ashes, because he was away as guest of the US Government when Patterson had a dramatic fainting spell, succumbing to the oppressive heat in an oxygen-starved room at Portmore Community College in November 2001.
“I felt it was a serious indictment on my part. I don’t know if it would have made a difference but I should have been present to do what I could do,” he says in retrospect. But the job also gave him keener insight into the mind of Patterson whom he describes as “introspective, contemplative, deliberate, strategic and decisive”.
Neither did has absence from the fainting episode prevent his boss from naming him a senator in 2002 and assigning him the significant job as junior minister for foreign affairs and foreign trade, just after leading the PNP to a fourth consecutive general election victory.
He also speaks highly of Keith Desmond ‘KD’ Knight who took over the ministry after a valiant, if unwinnable fight against crime in the national security ministry. “We work well together and he allows me as a junior minister to give leadership in the areas to which I am assigned.”
In that same year, Franklyn wrote the book The Right Move for which he interviewed 34 business people who had been nominated for Business Observer Business Leader Award. And his love is proudly written on the hearts of daughters, Tiffany, 18 and Maya, 7, both of whom live in London with their mother from whom he is divorced.
Delano Franklyn belongs to that group of people who are driven by a passion and a destiny to leave their footprints on the sands of history.