Seaga's going -- too long in coming
Analysis by Rickey Singh
Guyana Chronicle
July 3, 2004
IT WAS long in coming -- too long, his challengers and critics would say.
However, when the announcement eventually came on Tuesday from Edward Seaga himself about his decision to quit the leadership of the Jamaica Labour Party, both opponents and loyalists were expressing shock and singing his praise.
For some three decades, the 74-year-old Seaga, twice Prime Minister, held a firm leadership grip on the 60-year old JLP, one of the oldest and better known political parties of the Caribbean Community.
During that period the mercurial Seaga, who belongs to a category of the region's most astute and experienced politicians, had survived a number of leadership challenges.
Known more for a tense than relaxed public appearance, he had the satisfaction of witnessing the political carcasses of various of his challengers and staunch party critics littering the halls of conventions and emergency decision-making meetings of the JLP. He was invariably feared, hated, respected and loved.
Ironically, his announcement Tuesday to vacate the leadership at the November convention of the JLP, has come at a time when the prospects of the party being back in power at a new general election have never appeared as bright over the past 15 years that it has been languishing as a parliamentary opposition.
Now the mantle of leadership could well pass to the current JLP Chairman, Bruce Golding, who had angrily severed ties with the party following frequent clashes with Seaga; formed his own party but failed to make an impact at two general elections; and, eventually, returned to his old political home during the 2002 general election.
At that election, the incumbent People's National Party created political history by securing a fourth consecutive term and for its leader, P. J. Patterson, a third consecutive term with an eight-seat plurality for the 60-member House of Representatives.
But it was a bruising victory with the JLP staging a stunning recovery from its mere 10 seats at the previous 1997 election to secure 26 of the parliamentary constituencies with 47 per cent of the popular valid votes to the PNP's 53 per cent.
Apart from the controversies he generated at CARICOM summits and special meetings, Seaga would also be remembered in regional politics for the critical role he had played, along with Barbados' Tom Adams, and Dominica's Eugenia Charles in the United States military invasion of Grenada in 1983.
He was seen as the ideological leader of the region's rightwing and conservative parties, long after the Grenada invasion, a reputation eclipsed partly by Mikhail Gorbachev's "perestroika politics" and subsequent disappearance of the Soviet Union. And, of course, the JLP's loss of state power.
Seaga also belongs to a school of regional politicians who simply did not know when to go, when to make way for peaceful leadership transition, without blood on the floor -- until it became too late.
However, his leadership departure, that some understandably view as having been forced upon him by current bitter inter-party wrangling, could yet create problems for those with ambitions to succeed him, as well as the ruling PNP when Patterson chooses to make his own leadership exit -- well ahead of the next general election in 2007.
(Courtesy Barbados Weekend Nation)