SEAGA on Golding, Manley ... and Eddie

Ian Boyne, Contributor

The Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) had lost the July 1986 local government elections and, on October 12, the party met to review its loss. Party leader Edward Seaga provoked much unease, when he told the meeting he might not be the person to lead the party into the next general election.

"Prime Minister," Senator Hugh Dawes intervened, "you have shocked the meeting. Could you withdraw to allow us to discuss this announcement among ourselves?" It wasn't the usual political ploy to summon support.

Twenty-four years later, it is disclosed by the former prime minister himself that, "Unknown to all was the fact that my most immediate burden was my private life ... . My wife Mitsy and I were growing apart. She was not accompanying me on overseas trips any more and the atmosphere at home, at times, was unpleasantly cold. It was as if we had little in common, which was a distinct difference to how we had lived for 21 years ... . I hardly saw my two children. For a couple of months, Mitsy had been hinting at a separation. She reached a position just before the JLP meeting".

personal life, pain

In the second volume of Edward Seaga: My Life and Leadership, the subject gives some rare glimpses into his personal life - and pain. We pick up the story: "It was at that point that I told her the position I would take with the party - that I would be willing to commit myself to two more years as prime minister to finish my mission and to retire from public life. In the meantime, I would get back to a more normal life. She did not believe I was serious. I still made my statement and asked the party to give me some time. Resigning now, not later, was perhaps the only way to save my family life, but it would plunge the country into an agonising crisis which, in its delicate and fragile state, could greatly damage its future".

If you think that's hubris and an indication of a messianic complex, you are wrong on the first, but spot on regarding the latter. Edward Phillip George Seaga has always had a sense of mission, a sense of historical destiny, and a calling to fulfil something higher than his own personal dreams and ambitions. He has always been a driven, determined and defiant man, which ordinary minds have assessed as pure arrogance.

But if you think of the quintessential politician today as self-grasping, greedy, corrupt and intoxicated by aggrandisement, you are not thinking about the political species to which Edward Seaga belongs. Accuse him of misplaced messianism and Promethean impulses. But to compare him to the stereotypical politician today is to be way off the mark. We go back to the story.

great disturbance

"Party supporters were pressing me. They gathered at the gate of Jamaica House and elsewhere. The Jamaica Manufacturers' Association complained that my statement was causing uncertainty. I addressed my constituents in Tivoli Gardens two days later: 'Nobody was seeking my position and there was no threat of rivalry within the party.' I could not openly reveal what was greatly disturbing me. But I realised that a decision had to be made now. Burying my own agony, I told the party I would continue to lead. I hoped that my family would forgive me."

It's a story that aptly summarises the political life of this man: his selflessness and commitment to party and country, his obsessive-compulsive sense of mission and duty. If ever there were a practitioner of political Calvinism, it was Edward Seaga, the politician. He has been misunderstood by many for all his political life. His two-volume auto-biography - more a political and social history - is his final attempt to help us understand him.

And if he fails with a generation too close to the events for objective analysis, he hopes through these volumes that future generations will absolve him. Or at least understand him.

The book does not contain as many 'juicy' things as the superficial would fancy, and some, if they dare invest the time to skim this 396-page volume, would be very disappointed that it does not throw around enough dirt on some people before they are interred. But he does write about his once heir-apparent Bruce Golding in this book to be launched in two weeks.

We learn in this volume that Seaga never intended to bring back Golding in the party until after the 2002 election, so as not to upset senior party leaders, but we now know why he did: The big men of this country had promised a whopping $100 million if Golding were brought back to help win the elections - and to position him to take over the party. I did not know the price tag, but I had written in 2002 that the moneyed classes had abandoned Seaga, whom they thought unwinnable, for Golding, then darling of the media.

It was at a central committee meeting on September 16, 2002, that Seaga got an urgent call to leave the meeting and go to a nearby office in New Kingston to speak to two wealthy contributors who pledged to raise $100 million to boost the election campaign. "I was flabbergasted!" Seaga exclaims in the book.

The generous offer was to make the legendarily obstinate party leader melt to the recommendation to bring back Golding.

"Golding was their choice because of my reputation of maintaining principled positions in Government negotiation and not compromising with deals ..."

Seaga points out that he would have brought back Golding after the election anyway and, in fact, tells of his sanctioning discussions between Karl Samuda and Golding about his return.

"Notwithstanding all the double dealings against me in the 1990s, enacted with or without his involvement, he was still the best bet for the future in terms of national profile. I had to think of the future of the party, not my own feelings".

And this has been characteristic of Seaga's leadership of the JLP - however wrong objectively or conspicuously he has been in his decisions.

personal differences

Years ago, he told me privately that he brought back Karl Samuda, despite what he saw as his treachery and defection to the People's National Party because he believed Samuda had something to offer the party. He would tell me of others whom he brought back because of how they could advance the party, even when he personally cared little for them.

After analysing the crushing failure of Golding's National Democratic Movement (NDM), Seaga writes: "The NDM would come to learn that the two established parties, JLP and PNP, were deeply entrenched and if their strength were to be shaken, it would not be on constitutional issues."

Further he says, "What was particularly upsetting to me was that I had fended off the Gang of Five in 1990, preserving the leadership so that, at the appropriate time, Golding could be my successor. But he allowed the coterie of political and some wealthy friends around him, whose prime motivation was self-interest, to persuade him that the time was right for him to act, rather than wait on the limited period I had left in politics. That, in my own opinion, was one of Golding's chief weaknesses: he allowed himself to be easily swayed, hence his inability to make up his mind."

Seaga's 1970s battle with Michael Manley and socialism was epic. The book makes clear that one of the things he is proudest of is reversing what he would see as the drift toward Soviet-style socialism, as well as the economic disasters of the period.

manley-soviet ties

In the book, Seaga unearths a testimony from a defector from the local Soviet embassy, who spilled the beans in terms of Moscow's secret dealings with Manley, and Manley's own alleged duplicity.

For example, we learn that when the Soviets stoutly protested against Jamaica's condemnation at the United Nations of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Manley told them that he and the majority of the Cabinet did not agree with Jamaica's public position, but went along with it because of pressure from the United States, the International Monetary Fund and the JLP. Seaga believes he has discovered documentary evidence that Manley had planned to pull Jamaica into the Soviet orbit to get economic assistance to build socialism.

In fact, the Soviet defector revealed that it was Moscow which restrained Manley from pushing for greater radicalism, as they did not readily want to bankroll another Cuba.

"Source comments that the leadership in Moscow understood that if quick change were to take place in Jamaica, Moscow would have to supply aid, and it was not in a position to do so". But, significantly, "source" said he was aware "of no Soviet or Cuban plans to take any sort of political action to help prevent a Manley election defeat or to tinker with elections outside of Jamaican law".

No one interested in Caribbean politics and history can fail to have this book in his library. It covers the entire period from 1980 to 2008 - as well as the 1970s, to which Seaga inescapably returns.

Self-indulgence

I was happy at the several complimentary remarks which Seaga makes about me in the book, and the fact that he reproduces three full columns I wrote. Pardon my self-indulgence, but this man, who had a very stormy relationship with the press (that's a whole story in itself), writes that I am "one of the more balanced columnists who built a reputation of high regard for the freshness of his thinking and the extent of his probes for revealed truth ... He was a columnist who insisted on balanced media reporting".

Seaga says that of all the tributes that were made in Parliament on the day he retired - many of which he reproduces - "I will add only one other tribute, because it was the most comprehensive of all the presentations and comments from anyone ... It painted the most insightful picture of me, warts and all".

But you owe it to yourself to read Seaga on Seaga.

Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist who may be reached at ianboyne1@yahoo.com or columns@gleanerjm.com.



Prime Minister Michael Manley delivers a speech in Falmouth in 1973. -

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