EDWARD SEAGA: Edward Seaga is a good man, a clever politician, and a first-rate prime minister; however, Jamaica is a difficult country to govern. Violence and racial tensions are again on the rise, and Seaga was not able to attract the investment capital that he had hoped for under the vaunted Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI).
Seaga's popularity has been slipping--as it almost inevitably would for any elected leader over an eight-year period. Jamaicans have by now forgotten how disastrous Manley's earlier rule was. The stage is therefore set for an electoral showdown between the two.
Seaga and Manley may be looked on as the two great caudillos, or men-on-horseback, of modern Jamaican politics. These are, however, caudillos who vie in the electoral arena, not the military one. Jamaica, after all, is a former British, not Spanish, colony, and its form of government stems from the Westminster model, not the barracks. Nevertheless, the rival caudillo image is appropriate: two longtime rivals, both self-important, competitors not just for elected office, but in terms of their ideas, for the hearts and minds of their peoples and for the future of their country. In this high-stakes drama, both have their machismo at risk as well. And with its rising tension, violence, and potential for conflict, Jamaica could be on its way to becoming a Latin American country.
Right Honorable Edward Philip George Seaga was born in Boston on May 28, 1930. His father was a successful Jamaican travel agent. His parents were of Lebanese, Scottish, and Jamaican ancestry. Seaga attended the Wolmers Boys School in Kingston and received a bachelor of arts in social science from Harvard University in 1952. He did research on Jamaican spiritualist cults through the University of the West Indies, research that later served him in good stead in his electoral career. He was married in 1965 to a former Miss Jamaica.
Seaga has had a long and distinguished political career. It began in1959, before Jamaica acquired independence, when then-leader of the Jamaican Labor Party (JLP) Sir Alexander Bustamante, admiring Seaga's fiery speeches, asked him to serve in the upper house of the legislature. At twenty-nine, Seaga was the youngest member in its history. He was also the youngest member of the assembly that drafted Jamaica's constitution in 1962, under which it became independent that same year.
During the JLP reign from 1962 to 1972, Seaga served as Minister of Development and Welfare and as Minister of Finance and Planning. He was appointed a governor of the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, and established the Mortgage and Development bank in Jamaica. Known as a capable administrator, Seaga moved easily in the world of bankers, traders and entrepreneurs.
The JLP lost power to Manley in 1972, and two years later Seaga became leader of the opposition. Although he says that during this period he contemplated getting out of politics, Seaga stayed with it and in 1980, due to both his own talents and Manley's disasters, he was decisively elected prime minister.
The JLP has its roots in the Jamaican trade union movement. Never really militant in a Marxist sense, it was nonetheless a product of the trade union struggles and ideological skirmishes
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