Dawn Ritch
CERTAIN TOP-RANKING Comrades love to remind me that I was an avid supporter of the People's National Party in my youth. It's true. But at that time I aspired to being an intellectual, a hangover from university in Canada.
Alexander Bustamante seemed a cretin, and was a huge embarrassment to people like me. When asked for his foreign policy he replied "We are with the West". It was decades before I realised that this was not only sound, but the most elegant summary possible.
False pride like this makes fools of intellectuals, and anyone who pays the slightest attention to them.
Let the record show, however, that by 1970 I wanted Robert Lightbourne for Prime Minister and not Michael Manley. It was only because my sociology professor said this was impossible, as indeed it was by that time. So I wrote a paper instead on Michael Manley, whom this professor then called (My) Blue Eyed Boy. So much for freedom of thought.
Robert Lightbourne was the greatest Minister of Trade and Industry this country has ever known. He did more for Jamaican development than anybody else before, or since. A JLP statesman, he was denied its leadership because it was put on the road that he was a bribe-taker and temperamental.
I was a child then, and heard him called "Mister Ten Per cent" behind his back. Because nobody would say it to his face. Bob was an utterly charming and brilliant individual, as well as being tall, graceful and striking. Whenever he arrived the party began, if it hadn't already started before.
Jamaicans admired the opportunities that tourism, apparel, tyres, cement, and gypsum industries which he fostered brought to Jamaica for the first time. Their new employees and customers were particularly happy.
But there was something that killed Bob's political future more surely than his rivals Hugh Shearer and Edward Seaga, or even his nickname.
ROMANTIC AND MYSTERIOUS
This highly cultivated man could play the classical organ. For some reason unknown to history and probably to himself, Bob liked to go alone into the Morant Bay Parish Church at night. He would take off all his clothes, sit down and play hymns on the organ. The tiny old church was always beautifully maintained. Bob and his sister saw to it at their own expense. That didn't give him a licence to be nude in the church at night for whatever purpose. Nor do I believe he would have sought one for any reason. To me this made him the most romantic and mysterious person the length and breadth of the country. In his later life he had a piano at his home that he used to play every night. There are no reports of him having played nude in company.
I suppose this made him peculiar to his political contemporaries, and gossiped about by some of his social ones. If all he knew how to do was play the stereo, not a soul would have thought him temperamental. All the people who used to ridicule him, particularly when he set up a splinter political party to the JLP and lost his deposit, lived to rue the day that he did not become Leader of the Jamaica Labour Party. On many verandahs it was said after his death, at least he took 10 per cent, but left the rest for the country.
This is not to say that Edward Seaga took anything, or even the whole hog. But there were other people who enriched themselves unjustly in the eyes of many. Bob was predictable, organised and professional. Above all he was scrupulously fair. The successors to Alexander Bustamante and Norman Manley were Hugh Shearer and Edward Seaga on the JLP side instead of Bob, and Michael Manley on the PNP side instead of Viv Blake. Even if Lightbourne had lost the 1972 election, there would have been no flirtation with communism and Cuba had Vivian Blake been Prime Minister. That first wrong term cost us at least four generations of growth, compounded by the abrogation of our bauxite contracts. That must be a square-root of something.
Jamaica would have been a vastly different place today, surpassing the Cayman Islands, if it had gone the other way. There would have been no tribalism and therefore no need for five flights a day. Overseas entities would be running us down to lend us money at cheap interest rates.
MISSED OPPORTUNITY
International grants would be available anytime we wanted, because everybody would know we always did something sensible with them. This was a missed opportunity.
Instead we have what we have because of party structure, not because we lack a few good men. Or women. Party structure always seems to step in to kill the best chances of a country. By the time all the various tallies have been taken, the injuries and condescensions counted, the favours called in, and the party hierarchy given its pound of flesh it's a wonder we haven't had a jackass yet as Prime Minister of Jamaica. Although some might think I'm being generous.
It is worth noting that in the 1960s Bob Lightbourne's ministerial portfolio encompassed tourism, sports, shipping, telecommunications, mining, commerce, industry, energy, foreign trade, export promotion, investment attraction and lighthouses. Today about six or seven Cabinet ministers carry these portfolios separately, and to far less effect. By any measure Bob was a superior human being. I don't think the fact that Bob was jet black militated against his political chances, although the succession in both parties went to Pretty Brown Boys. He was described in the 1960s by London's Sunday Times as an Afro-Saxon, no doubt out of a fundamental conviction that he was whiter than any of them.
So even while I campaigned for the PNP, I was longing for Bob. Whom I could never have. As Herbie Eldemire said of him, "He is the only man who could play the piano with one hand while standing with a glass of scotch in the other, and at the same time conduct a successful negotiation."
The quality of the person therefore, is always far more important than the party which he or she represents.
FOOTNOTE: Bank of Jamaica's Balance Sheet as at April 14, 2004 shows that their losses have risen to J$2.78 billion.
