Ian Boyne, Contributor
WE MUST not be disingenuous by taking away from the Jamaica Labour Party's (JLP) wide and unexpected parish margin of victory over the People's National Party (PNP). But we should not ignore the fact that despite the JLP's campaigning on a national platform and almost totally ignoring Local Government issues, the vast majority of voters stayed away from the polls.
In light of the hardships on the Jamaican people, the bitterness over the recent tax measures, and especially the widespread perception that the Budget deficit was preventable but for political expediency, one should reasonably have expected a greater revolt against the PNP. So, yes, the JLP must be commended for its handsome victory in terms of its gaining the majority of the small minority who did muster the interest to go out to vote, but we should not fail to note the increasing alienation of the many.
The usual retort that people are not generally interested in Local Government elections ignores two facts. One is that this 40 per cent turnout is the second lowest since Independence. And the other is that the elections were fought as a referendum against a Government which had just imposed unpopular tax measures and which had been attacked by the JLP as corrupt, unjust, incompetent and deserving to be sent a decisive message. Yet more than one million people in this small country did not bother to protest and did not heed the call.
The partisans for the PNP, of course, will spend a lot of time on this fact, and this raises the difficulty of discussing issues seriously in this country: Every time you raise an issue, it is assessed not on the basis of its own merit but on the basis of its relationship to the position held by either the PNP or the JLP. It is hard to do serious intellectual work in this tribalised political culture, and quite intimidating for the faint-hearted.
So when one raises the issue of the JLP's victory in the context of the appallingly low turnout, it is seen as a PNP apologetic for its 'dismal showing at the polls'.
Meanwhile, many in the PNP comfort themselves by saying that Eddie Seaga won the elections because their Comrades stayed home this time, either out of some family dissatisfaction or out of the realisation that as the party President said, whatever happened he would still be Prime Minister the day after elections.
SHOWERING PRAISE
Many in the media have been showering Mr. Seaga with praises and kudos, surprised that he actually won the elections. The Gleaner came out with a stunningly fulsome editorial, 'The Seaga factor', in Wednesday's edition. (It was an excellently written and incisive piece dismissing certain well-worn misinformation against Seaga and pointing to some of his little-acknowledged strengths). The propaganda had built up that "Seaga is unelectable" and that the JLP could not win any election under his leadership. Of course, Mr. Seaga's determined critics could still maintain that that thesis has not been disproved, for Mr. Seaga is yet to win an election which the people know would make him Prime Minister!
APATHY
As we continue with our senseless, humourless partisan games in Jamaica, the JLP will continue to juice everything out of this Local Government victory and will make all kinds of claims on behalf of the Jamaican people, even believing it has a mandate to bring down the Government. While the PNP will make light of the victory and remind that a day, let alone four years, is a long time in politics. No need to worry.
But the majority of Jamaicans who have become turned off and disillusioned by, or simply uninterested in the political system do give some cause for worry. If we leave the outcome of elections only to the die-hards, partisans and the cultic followers of the two parties, what future does Jamaica have? If the people who are in effect deciding our fate and the use of political power in the country are those who are the beneficiaries of patronage politics, then what hope is there for the building of a mature, sophisticated and responsive political culture? How can the uncommitted be won back to Jamaican politics, and what are the primary factors responsible for the declining interest in the Jamaican political process?
First, it must be noted that declining political participation is not a phenomenon restricted to Jamaica, but is an increasing feature of Western democracies. In the industrialised world particularly, there has been a sharp decline in the percentage of the population voting in elections. Even as there is an increase in civil society participation. We share some of the reasons for the decline in other Western democracies but also some dissimilarities.
POLITICAL MARGINALISATION
There has been a general marginalisation of politics around the world as the neo-liberal model of economic development and the triumph of a free market culture has been celebrated. In the industrialised world where there has been fairly consistent economic growth, there are enough opportunities in the marketplace for people to be independent of politics and politicians. Though some scholars argue that the state is not about to wither away, indeed, it has been re-engineered and 'reinvented' to deal with new challenges.
Technological and economic changes in society have given people a greater sense of autonomy and control of their own destiny. As such, there is a decreased sense that they have to depend on politicians for their welfare. Here in Jamaica, it is not growth and greater economic opportunities which have given people a sense of independence from politics, but a disgust over the corruption and immorality embedded in our political culture. Our clientelistic, scarce-benefits-and-spoils politics is repulsive and revolting to many people. Too many of us know of the corruption, political victimisation, enrichment of friends and patronage to constituents which go on in the name of Jamaican political 'runnings'.
After a while in a democracy as people experience the underbelly of politics and begin to have a sense of despair over really reforming it, they retreat into their private space and concentrate on building their little world and, just 'blood' the whole system.
INDIVIDUALISTIC
Today many people say, "Me naw vote for the politician dem for dem naw do nutten fi me", reflecting both a reality and a decadence. The failure of the state to deliver on consistent economic growth and improved living standards has resulted in a warped understanding of what politics should really be about. The patronage, 'let off', personal-benefits type of rotten politics which we have practised in Jamaica produces that kind of attitude, which feeds the political alienation and cynicism. Dr. Peter Phillips made some very insightful statements on the morning after the decisive JLP defeat in the Local Government polls.
Phillips, an incisive thinker, noted that people had become more individualistic and less community-oriented. They thought of benefits not in terms of what happened to their community in terms of the provision of schools, community centres, roads, but in terms of what they themselves received.
Finally, the politicians are coming around to see that some cultural, attitudinal factors are crucial and that the alienation from politics is not essentially about bread and butter, economic issues when you really get down to it.
Edward Seaga, a much too underrated thinker and social anthropologist, told 'The Breakfast Club' hosts that the economic issues were not really the most decisive in the PNP's recent defeat, as important as those were. It was trust, Mr. Seaga said quietly but profoundly. On the same morning two leading politicians had surgically dissected the problem with the Jamaican body politic. There is hope.
IDEOLOGICAL VACUUM
I could have told the Prime Minister, and did in a recent column, that dra-wing attention to a 3.4 per cent growth in the last two quarters would not mean much to a cynical population. The polls showed that a majority of people, including PNP supporters, did not believe the Government's figures. All the logical explanations given by Dennis Morrison and Wesley Hughes will make no difference when people have lost trust. Seaga was right about the trust issue and Phillips put his finger on the pulse of the issue when he singled out the narrow self-interests which drive people in Jamaica today.
The PNP voters did not get enough spoils to make it worth their while to come out to vote. When your party base has to depend on handouts and personal benefits to be motivated, then you know something is wrong. Which leads us to another reason for the high political alienation in Jamaica: There are no grand ideas anymore.
We don't really have any ideology whether black power, nationalism, socialism or anti-communism to get us excited and roused to action. We are bored with politics. Our stomachs are not being fed and neither are our hearts and minds. There is nothing to raise the adrenaline, to make us want to commit our lives to. The Political Project has run out of steam.
And the problem is not just with the two main political parties. This is the frequently made mistake in analysis. The NDM came with some ideas and there was excitement for a while, but there was no sustenance. After a while idealists like Antonnette Haughton-Cardenas have to come to their senses and gone back to their talk shows on radio and utopians like Al Miller have to take to the streets for Christ rather than for Caesar.
PUBLIC CYNICISM
The cynicism in our political culture affects the good and the bad and there is no Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals (BHAG), to borrow a management phrase, to put the Humpty Dumpty together again. The lack of trust of which Mr. Seaga so insightfully spoke also affects the JLP. He would be fooling himself if he believed it is just the PNP the people don't trust. The more than one million Jamaicans who could have voted and didn't don't trust the JLP either. Despite the "record of closed factories, downsized and capsized factories, failed financial institutions, foreclosed homes, job losses and the correlative social agony (which) have frustrated and tormented hundreds of thousands of Jamaicans who now struggle to make ends meet" (Delroy Chuck, The Gleaner, June 25), over one million Jamaicans stayed away from the polls and did not heed the JLP's call to "send them a message". That speaks as eloquently as the JLP victory.
And while the PNP licks its wounds, assesses where it has gone wrong and how it can 'wield and come again', the JLP had better spend some time in sober reflection as to how it can win back the uncommitted. It will have to take the blinkers off, though. Savour and celebrate the victory now, but if this victory is to translate into the really meaningful electoral victory which the JLP needs, it will have to aim its strategies at that huge bulk of uncommitted who see no reason to vote JLP.
Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist. E-mail: ianboyne@yahoo.com.
