ST ANN SE HEATS UP

The opposition People’s National Party (PNP) has rebuffed suggestions by outgoing St Ann South Eastern Member of Parliament Lisa Hanna that it is denying delegates the right to select who the party puts forward as its candidate in the next parliamentary polls.

Former West Indies international cricketer Wavell Hinds, JMMB Group Chief Operating Officer Patricia Duncan Sutherland, and Harvard graduate Dr Kenneth Russell are the PNP members seeking the nod.

PNP General Secretary Dr Dayton Campbell told The Gleaner on Friday that the party’s National Executive Council (NEC) decided on the selection process for prospective candidates from as far back as January at a meeting in Runaway Bay, St Ann, and said that this included ratification from the delegates.

The NEC is the PNP’s highest decision-making body outside of its annual conference, traditionally held in September.

Campbell said that at that meeting, several layers of screening were decided on, including at the regional level, through the party’s integrity commission and by the polling of the constituency.

Campbell said that the NEC set criteria which included that a candidate needed to face a poll in order to move on to face the delegates for selection.

The Gleaner learnt that candidates must obtain at least 25 per cent favourability at the poll in order to move on.

Hinds, who unsuccessfully contested Hanover Eastern for the PNP in the September 2020 general election, emerged the frontrunner in St Ann South Eastern, with 49.3 per cent of respondents indicating that he would be the best person to represent the party if an election were to be called soon, according to an internal document seen by The Gleaner.

Nine per cent of respondents expressed a preference for Russell, while 8.5 per cent lined up behind Duncan Sutherland, who has represented the party on multiple occasions in Clarendon South Eastern, including in the last general election.

Campbell said that the PNP’s constitution allows for delegates of a “recognised” constituency to have a say in who is selected as candidate, while it is not so for “unrecognised” constituencies.

It deems a constituency recognised if it has at least 20 financial groups within the constituency spread across all divisions as well as women’s movement and PNP Youth Organisation units.

St Ann South Eastern is considered a recognised constituency.

“In the instance where only one applicant is there for a seat, that person would still have to go to the delegates for a yes/no vote. If there are two applicants and only one of them is above the threshold (25 per cent), then that one would go for the yes/no vote. If both are above the threshold, then both would go to the delegates for them to decide which of the candidates they want,” said Campbell.

“The idea is that we want to get a candidate that can not only win the selection to become the candidate for the constituency, but can win the external election against the Jamaica Labour Party, thus bringing that seat into the column of the PNP,” he added.

Hanna had early on Friday criticised the party’s leadership on Twitter, arguing that it chose to support the Jamaican Constitution but at the same time was undermining the constitution of the PNP.

“The PNP has always been the party in support of democracy and upholding the constitutional rights of all Jamaicans. These ideals are sacrosanct. Therefore, what is good for the [goose] ought to be good for the gander. You cannot want to support the Jamaican Constitution for our people on the one hand but [flout] the PNP’s constitution on the other. I have always supported this principle,” she wrote.

Hanna, who had become a lightning rod for disgruntled party supporters in the constituency, which forced her to announce a premature departure from representational politics last August, pointed to her time under the delegates’ microscope when she was challenged by Lydia Richards, the councillor for the Bensonton division.

Hanna prevailed, polling 468 delegates’ votes to Richards’ 10.

That internal election marked the crescendo in the issues between the former Miss World and her councillors which persist to date.

“I could have made political moves to circumvent a delegate election, but I insisted that I faced the delegates in a selection conference and that they must be enfranchised to speak. This is the constitutional right of every financial member of the party … .

“Those who feel this system is archaic should move to amend the party’s constitution and do away with the delegates system to one of just popularity polling. However, that decision resides only within the party’s annual conference domains. Let’s not just go with the flow as the means to the destination. Anything worthwhile in life for people’s progress is worth fighting for. Stand your ground SESA (South East St Ann) delegates.

“The democracy of the PNP depends on you,” she urged a day after several protested against the poll results.

The four-term MP’s charge has not gone down well with several members of the party, who called Hanna a “hypocrite” in light of her position.

The members, who spoke to The Gleaner on condition of anonymity, citing the still-fragile state of the party, said Hanna was not only uninformed but was lashing out because her preferred candidate, Russell, had not found favour with those polled.

The Gleaner has learnt that Russell is the brother of Hanna’s constituency secretary, Ezekiel Russell.

The Gleaner contacted Hanna for comment on the matter, but up to press time, she did not respond.

Russell, meanwhile, declined to comment on the matter, noting only that he has written to the PNP to express his concerns about the selection exercise.

“Now I leave it to the judgement of the NEC, which is meeting on Sunday, to ensure that we have a selection conference, one that will allow the delegates to decide on the candidate who they would like to represent them.

“This is in the context of a constituency which has a history and still, there are lingering sensitivities around participation in the selection of MP candidate,” he told The Gleaner late on Friday.

When pointed to how the selection process was outlined to be undertaken, Russell insisted that he was leaving the matter to the judgement of the NEC.

But councillor for the Beecher Town division, Ian Bell, has asserted that Russell does not have the support of himself and two other sitting PNP councillors, and neither does he have the support of the councillor-caretaker.

Bell, who had a public fallout with Hanna in June 2021, said the councillors were “110 per cent” satisfied with the selection process as outlined.

Further, he rubbished Hanna’s social media post, arguing that she was “parachuted” into the constituency.

“She didn’t even have a vote on the electoral voters’ list. She was not a member of the party, so she must remember all those things when she is going to try to create mayhem in the constituency,” said Bell.

He noted that there has never been a selection process in the constituency for a PNP candidate and that the closest had been when Hanna was challenged by Richards in 2015.

The party has never lost the seat in a contested general election.

“Before that, there was never ever a selection process. Seymour ‘Foggy’ Mullings, of blessed memory, was put there by Norman Washington Manley. Aloun Assamba was put there by Percival Noel James Patterson. Lisa Hanna was put there by Comrade Portia Simpson Miller,” he argued.

The Gleaner was unable to reach Hinds for comment.

Meanwhile, Duncan Sutherland said that she was satisfied with the selection process outlined, but not how it was being executed.

“But we are working it out as a party,” she said.

Additionally, she said that at the time the poll was conducted, she had been in the constituency for only two weeks and that the results would be different had it been done now.

editorial@gleanerjm.com