SeagaThe following are excerpts of the speech made to Parliament last week Wednesday by Opposition Leader Edward Seaga, after he had received several messages of congratulation on achieving 40 years of unbroken service to his constituency and to politics in Jamaica.
IT IS a great honour for me to be honoured today by my colleagues in Parliament and the country for my 40 years of service to this honourable House.
Parliament is an institution in our land that has been a hall through which many have passed. Many who have left marks and others have not. To my mind, my mark which has been here for 40 years is one of endurance and I will not wish to think that is all that I have contributed.
I want to take the opportunity in speaking of these past 40 years which are virtually the better part of all of my adult life to say a few things that are to be considered educational, as over the years my colleagues have said to me, you know people do not know you. One even said to me that it is even believed that I came to Jamaica dressed in a white suit and white hat and white shoes when I was a grown person.
I AM A JAMAICAN
To set the record straight, after my birth in Boston, Massachusetts in a Salvation Army Hospital at the time when my parents were travelling, I was returned home when I was three months.
Indeed the certificate exists in the Kingston Parish Church of my baptism on the 5th December 1930. So that clearly indicates I've been here all my life and this is why I never had any difficulty in taking that decision when it was an appropriate time as to whether I wanted to be a citizen of the land of my birth or a citizen of the land of my father's birth and that shows that I wanted to be a citizen of Jamaica and a Jamaican.
I went to school here throughout all those years and, as to be expected of a normal school life, I did my stints in academics, I did my stints in sports and the fact that I was an active athlete I did quite well on the academic side.
What I remember most of all from my days in early school was the character training that I had and it is why I myself am so concerned about the lack of character training.
I remember when my headmaster John Bunting called me one day to his office and said that he was going to appoint me as a prefect. And he said to me, if you saw a boy doing something that was wrong, what would you do? I said I would warn him. And he said, if you saw him doing the same thing again, what would you do?
I said I would warn him again. He said no. Never warn twice. And I can assure you that I have followed that advice all of my life and all of the time I thought it was sound advice and that is only symptomatic of the sort of character training that you had in the secondary schools of those days.
My days at Harvard left an indelible impression on me, impression of an awesome institution of learning; one which you can feel in the thickness of the air around you; after leaving Harvard I was committed to doing something in the medical field by my mother who wanted me to be a doctor.
I admit I wasn't too interested. So I came to the university here with the intention of studying medicine and the intention of going on to psychiatry. I found myself in unhappy circumstances.
I wasn't interested in the subject, it didn't excite me and it got to the point where I was even joking about it. All the medical students had cadavers which they were working on. And when Professor Harper came to the cadaver I was working on and he said, 'Sir Seaga how are you doing?' I said, 'Very good, professor, I am working in dead ends.'
I found time flexible that I used to use in my sociology and anthropology class in the Institute of Social Economics and I got excited and I said let me go and do some research. I got a small stipend and I went to live in Buxton Town. It didn't take me long to realise that this was a different university. This was a university in which what we are learning does not come from text books. I learned of an entirely different type of life.
I learned different cultures, the experiences of the family, about agriculture, sports, the days that the JAS would come to demonstrate how to plant citrus trees around all the other things that make up all the other village life. It was a wonderful village life.
Until today I am still treated as a member of that community. I gave a number of children there to marriage and recently one came back from Colorado to look for me and I have been back since, on instances in which they have been funerals. It was a wonderful feeling that I have never forgotten.
Then I left that part of Buxton Town and went to live in Salt Lane. Salt Lane was part of the West Kingston that I had known. My grandfather on my father's side did business further down West King Street, so I as a child used to go there and knew a few people. But to live in Salt Lane and to study what I had come to study and that is the indigenous cults of Jamaica, having studied family life and child development in Buxton Town was an entirely different thing where you were exposed to a rich life of interaction among people.
And it was something that in the normal experience I had come to realise as part of the reason why we are so rich in creativity.
You pass any lane and look up or down you will never see it empty. It always has an intermingling of people from one yard to the other. Because the houses in those lanes are small. People cannot live in their homes, that's where they sleep.
They don't even eat in their homes, you pass them you see a man standing with a basin or a dish right in out in the street eating, sometimes brushing their teeth. They are always talking, always interacting and families grow up there over the years as one large extended family. And out of that interaction comes the creativity of the people. If those people were put in housing schemes in which they would live in individual units separated by space, that interaction wouldn't be there and we would be the poorer for the lack of the vitality which comes with the mixing of people.
Add that to the community with trading at the Coronation Market, and the other markets to which people come as an influx from the country, the patterns that the relationships had developed and a community that is very rich in creativity emerges.
Out of that came studies that I did and from which I had done some writing neglectfully, not as much and fortunately I still have my notes which I intend to go back to on occasion. I collected samples of herbs and folk medicine and passed them on to the university at the time.
I wrote about Jamaica's herbs that are curative, wrote about the parent/teacher relationships around children and a number of other articles. Most importantly I collected the music. The religious music and secular music that led me to publish an album.
I learnt something in politics that leadership is something that has to be developed. The most important factor in leadership is not learning how to satisfy people but how to say no. And when you cannot say no, you cannot lead, people lead you. The people of the community of Salt Lane that I lived in taught me many things that I would never have learnt elsewhere. I treasure them.
I had the opportunity to be married to two lovely women; my first wife taught me to be calm, look at the wider perspective; stop and smell the roses. We had three children who are a blessing; it is wonderful when you can raise children and they are not involved in drugs or law breaking etc., they have taught me how to respect them. I regret that I never had the chance in all the time I was devoted to politics to give them more attention than I did.
My wife, Carla, has been des-cribed as the wind beneath my wings; she's an extraordinary person and over the years we never had a quarrel that lasted overnight. We have arguments, both of us are very stubborn, we are both dedicated and she is a wonderful assistant to me. I have had a rich wonderful life and I feel that at this time I should say something that touches on the economic and social life of the country.
The most dangerous thing that can happen to us in political life is to believe that power is an end in itself and to pursue power by any way or means with the maxim "the end justifies the means." It diverts you from your own mission. I came into politics for the simple reason that having studied in the university of Jamaican life, I wanted an opportunity to put what I had learnt into practical schemes and projects. I wanted to do for the people what I knew could be done having had the experience that they gave me coming from the background where I would be able to do something.
When I became a minister of Government in the 1970s, I was able to peak very quickly with a rapid succession of cultural and social projects because they had all germinated in my mind from those experiences. That gave me great satisfaction because I had learnt something and had transformed it into projects and those projects transformed the lives of people. That was my mission. That does not say that I did not fall at times. I know that I have fallen foul and I know that I've regretted it and I've said things and done things in life that I've regretted because I was a victim of that course.
When I became Prime Minister, I tried to resist that all the way through. I was very successful because I had had more experience and a better understanding of how you can go wrong in what is the basis of putting political power first. That's populism when you take it to the extreme to maintain power at any cost that is a bad thing.
I hope to see an end to this pattern of development that has plagued us since independence and continues to take us two steps forward and two steps backwards. And the end result is that we cancel out the gains and remain at zero. After 40 years we have hardly moved; if on every occasion that there was a change, one team would take the baton and advance it and so on, we would be well up there with Singapore and other countries of the world.
We must do everything - and I mean this very sincerely - to find out why this two steps forward and two steps backwards is a part of our development pattern; we must try to eradicate it so that there is a smooth transition and continuous path of growth. We must continue to talk about and determine how to get rid of this.
I speak now to an area that I feel very strongly about and it comes out of the life and experiences that I've had. That is the social divisions of this country. To me it's one of the greatest negatives that exist in our minds; whether you want to call it uptown and downtown, inner-city and residential area, urban and rural or rich and poor the fact of the matter is that the minority of people, who have the power, wealth and opportunity to do things, know very little about the people of their own country.
Because of that we have injustice and a system where those who have the privilege and power can create an economy in which that enclave wallows off the rest of the country. So the inner cities have to create their own economies around their market systems of trading, petty manufacturing etc. because they can't penetrate the economy that has been structured for the people who have wealth, power and privilege.
As a society we cannot continue to have a system where those who are less fortunate have to go to schools that are less well-funded and less able to take a child from poor origins and give him a vertical ladder to climb out. That is how Jamaicans improve.
Jamaican women are the richest resource that this land has, they never give up; it's an indomitable feature in the life of this nation and it is a resource that you cannot measure or test. Having schools that perpetuate poverty is not giving youngsters a chance for social mobility. If you go to school ignorant and come out ignorant, you are spending the rest of your life in ignorance.
West Kingston is the oldest urban community in Jamaica, formulated when Kingston was settled. The western side where the poor live; what is upsetting is that these are the people who have put a Jamaica on the map with the music that has come out of the communities in the western section of the city. Not West Kingston alone - Trench Town, Jones Town etc. This music put Jamaica on the map yet they are the discarded ones. My purpose has been to give them the best so that they don't feel neglected and their children can grow up and not have to migrate.
For a time that worked and then came political divisions. Out of that have come a number of setbacks which have stopped the process of development. We have to find a way to settle these problems in a manner that will be sustainable. I'm never one to have a problem without trying find a solution.
I am deeply indebted to the rich experience that I have in Parliament and the relationships with colleagues on both sides. Yes we have had differences and fights but together we are part of one Parliament. I am deeply appreciative of my team on this side that has supported and I in turn have given them my support. They are a wonderful bunch and I value their support, advice and the work they do. I will continue to be there for them and for the future.
