Party and commission: The Manatt pickle

The commission of enquiry into the Manatt, Phelps & Phillips engagement by the Government of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) has begun its hearing. The issues being investigated are important in their own right. They can tell us much about how our Government works or has been working. There are inner conflicts and contradictions that we should know about.

Governing cannot be taken for granted. Much about how well we govern ourselves depends on how well Government is structured and operated. It is early days yet in the hearing, although some of the revelations about how the Government has been working are already intriguing.

The revelations will also reflect a deeper history of the JLP and of how things have come to be the way they are, that is, how the party got to this Manatt controversy in the first place. It is not just the history of the Manatt issues that is important to know but the history of the party and the forces that have come to surround it. It is those forces that ought really to be understood from this enquiry.

Much commentary has justifiably centred on the commission, its members and remit. But it is not out of place to comment on the JLP itself because, ultimately, it is the party and Government that are being investigated. There is a history to them.

Party History

The JLP rests on at least four different and conflicting foundations. There is the well-known labour foundation that is represented by the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union (BITU). This is the original foundation cast by the founder himself, Alexander Bustamante, as leader of the working people of the 1930s and 1940s. This is the foundation that gave the party its very name, 'labour'. But that foundation has, in effect, been eclipsed by other foundations.

Almost immediately after the first general election in 1944, the party underwent a partial metamorphosis. The upper classes, whose parties had done badly in elections in 1944 and 1949, began to infiltrate the JLP. Those behind the Jamaica Democratic Party and the Farmer's Party identified with the more populist but conservative JLP to oppose the socialist PNP. This was the second foundation. The party became a strange alliance between the working class and the merchant class. By the 1950s, the PNP had come to see the JLP less as a party of the workers and more as a party of merchants.

The third foundation was the Western Kingston/Tivoli Gardens garrison constituency established by Edward Seaga in the 1960s. It was a new and dangerous element in Jamaican politics and in two-party competition. It became a powerful part of the JLP alliance. Seaga needed his own independent base, and this was it. To the working class and the business class was added the underclass, the tough urban street-fighting lumpenproletariat (as Europeans call such types).

The fourth foundation is the modern business class that, in effect, threw out Edward Seaga but did not give up Western Kingston. Nor did it break with the BITU. The BITU had long since eschewed any pretence of working-class radicalism and was no threat to the business class. The business class, old money and new, merchant, manufacturer and modern service sector had long learned to live with the Western Kingston underclass as long as it was controlled politically. The business class could talk glibly and hypocritically about crime and its links with politics, but it lived comfortably with it and looked the other way.

There ought to have been a fifth JLP foundation, the National Democratic Movement (NDM). But that never materialised. It was to have been Golding's foundation when he re-entered the JLP. It was upon the NDM's reformism that he appeared, to some, to have made himself worthy of the JLP's leadership. But the re-entry was troubled from the start. To the NDM faithful, it represented Golding's sellout. To the Seaga-JLP, it represented betrayal. This included Tivoli forces under Christopher Coke. But to the business class who wanted to be rid of Seaga, Golding's embrace would bring big money into the party to finally defeat the PNP, especially after Portia Simpson Miller became PNP leader.

The Portia Factor

The Portia factor actually threw the JLP to desperate measures. The JLP won the 2007 election. But it was forced to do so with an alliance that was always contradictory and difficult to hold together. In this alliance, anyone was acceptable on any term; any promise could be made and any vote bought. It was the only way to defeat Portia. The JLP won the elections but lost virtue.

The election victory was so slim that the alliance was particularly fragile. It had to be defended at all cost because the Portia factor was always threatening. The JLP was afraid of Portia's power and was always looking over its shoulder at what she might do with her popularity. Golding was also sensitive to the perception that he had betrayed Seaga and Tivoli. And, he had never been put under any pressure by the business sponsors over his links with Tivoli and its shadowy underworld. He, therefore, tried to have it all ways.

It was this state of mind that the party was in when the extradition request for Coke came. Golding would defend Coke. But after this became a public scandal, the whole matter descended rapidly into one about which personalities played what role to defend Coke; misused what offices in the process; betrayed whose trust; and lied about it. This is what the commission of enquiry is trying to determine. This will tell us something about Government and those who run it.

Impact on Government

Already, it has told us some intriguing things. In fact, Ambassador Coye, of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, said on day one of the enquiry that the first delegation sent to meet with United States authorities on the extradition matter was effectively hijacked and ended up at the offices of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips. As far as she was concerned, it was a government delegation, not a JLP mission. So, right away the GOJ and Manatt had been engaged. An American had been surreptitiously inserted into the delegation on the authority, according to Coye, of the attorney general. The AG is, of course, answerable to the prime minister, who had subsequently threatened that she had to quit office if she had signed the order to extradite Coke. This is damning enough, and this was just on day one.

There is stress in other parts of the alliance as well. At its last conference, the JLP found it necessary to have a BITU speaker to pacify the working class which is under strain from 13 quarters of no growth. We now hear that there are more rounds of price increases to come this year. At the same time, other parts of the alliance are being further exposed. The Office of the Contractor General has spoken of serious irregularities and impropriety surrounding the Government's proposed sale of its shares in Sandals Whitehouse to Gordon 'Butch' Stewart's company.

Golding has failed badly to hold this impossibly contradictory and opportunistic alliance together. The enquiry will reveal more about how these contradictions have impacted on how Government works.

Robert Buddan lectures in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona. Email: Robert.Buddan@uwimona.edu.jm.