Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) leader Edward Seaga with supporters on the campaign trail in September 2002.
-Winston Sill photo
Howard Campbell, Gleaner Writer
WHEN EDWARD Seaga performs his final duties as Member of Parliament for West Kingston in February, his departure after over four decades in the job is bound to be emotional. His supporters will undoubtedly shed tears and his rivals are likely to breathe a sigh of relief.
On December 28, Mr. Seaga, 74, informed West Kingston delegates that he would be stepping down as MP to take up a post at the University of West Indies' Mona campus. Six months earlier he announced his resignation as leader of the opposition Jamaica Labour Party, a position he held for 30 years. Mr. Seaga was first elected West Kingston MP in 1962 in Jamaica's first election as an independent nation, making him the longest-serving parliamentarian in Jamaican politics. But for some unfinished projects, he says his time in West Kingston has been fruitful.
OPPORTUNITIES
"I consider West Kingston a diamond field and every time I go there I'm looking for a new diamond," Mr. Seaga told The Sunday Gleaner last week. "My concept was to provide a range of opportunities for the people there. That was the intention and it has worked, undoubtedly."
Although he pointed with pride to the projects he initiated there, Mr. Seaga says he is disappointed that he never completed two that were close to his heart a housing development in Denham Town and re-designing the West Kingston market area. Currently, the National Housing Trust, through its Inner-City Housing Programme, is constructing low-income housing schemes in Denham Town. The market project, which Mr. Seaga says he conceptualised in the late 1970s, will be completed by the Kingston Waterfront Development Programme. Despite its achievements in commerce, the arts and sport, West Kingston still carries the unflattering tag of garrison community. Mr. Seaga's critics say he has turned a blind eye to crime and concentrated mainly on Tivoli Gardens while neighbouring communities deteriorated.
Dr. Clinton Hutton, a lecturer in the Department of Government at the UWI, believes West Kingston's reputation for harbouring criminals has prevented it from being a community that should be emulated.
"Tivoli especially had the potential to become a model community. But if the law cannot do its duty without hindrance it cannot be called one," Dr. Hutton said. The nurturing of musical talent, development of low-income housing and community centres and grooming the area's youth for a place in mainstream society are some of the successes of Mr. Seaga's stewardship. But the constituency has also produced notorious area leaders such as Claudius Massop, Lester Lloyd 'Jim Brown' Coke and Aston 'Bucky' Marshall. In the last 10 years, West Kingston has seen its share of bloodshed. The most tragic of these took place in July 2001 when thugs battled security forces in a three-day stand-off that got international attention; 27 persons were killed.
Mr. Seaga acknowledged the seedier side of his constituency but was more willing to speak of its accomplishments. He said West Kingston is proof that persons from impoverished areas can excel once the right programmes are implemented.
"I'm a great believer that the environment one lives in conditions the mind and helps to change the mindset. And that's what I wanted to do with West Kingston: I not only wanted to take the man out of the slum, but the slum out of the man," he said.
ANTHROPOLOGY MAJOR
Although he followed in the footsteps of Alexander Bustamante and Hugh Shearer as the JLP's man in West Kingston, Mr. Seaga was not unfamiliar to the area. An anthropology major while at Harvard University, he lived at Salt Lane in the early 1960s while he researched the origins of Jamaican folk forms. By the time he ran against Dudley Thompson of the People's National Party in 1962, he was fairly entrenched. At the time of Mr. Seaga's arrival in West Kingston the area comprised two communities, Denham Town and Hannah Town. It was where Kingston's abattoir, garbage dump, morgue, sewerage plant and the May Pen Cemetery were located.
According to Mr. Seaga, "It was the rectum of the city. My job was to change these things around."
Mainly through government funding, he did just that during the 1960s by transforming the area's physical appearance and introducing several youth programmes. The way he went about this transformation did not always go down well with his detractors.
VICTIMISATION
The bulldozing of 40 acres of land occupied by squatters in 1966 was seen as victimisation of persons who did not support him. The evacuation was followed by gun battles between supporters of Seaga and Dudley Thompson, a lawyer who had been part of Kenyan nationalist Jomo Kenyatta's legal team during the Mau Mau uprisings in the 1950s.
This period of unrest in West Kingston is noted by some historians as the first instance of sustained political violence in independent Jamaica. Dr. Hutton says the "political re-engineering" of areas like West Kingston continues to hurt Jamaica. "The leaders of these communities may have had good intentions but we are learning the consequences of their actions now. If a lot of violence is still going on and a lot of people still feel alienated because of politics, then something is wrong," he said.
The JLP has, to date, accepted submissions from Kingston Mayor Desmond McKenzie and attorney Tom Tavares-Finson as the party's next parliamentary representative for West Kingston MP. A by-election against a PNP candidate to elect the consituency's new MP will be held later this year. Whoever succeeds him will have to contend with Edward Seaga's colossal image hanging over them.
