Whatever would Bruce Golding and Portia Simpson Miller do if they were not in politics? Golding graduated from the University of the West Indies, Mona, some have said, with mediocre grades, straight into his retiring father, Tacius Golding's St Catherine constituency. He has been a politician ever since.
Portia Simpson, after a brief stint as a clerk of some sort, entered representational politics and won a seat in the Kingston and St Andrew Corporation (KSAC). Under Anthony Spaulding's expert tutelage, she wrested the South-West St Andrew constituency, which adjoined his South St Andrew citadel, from the incumbent People's National Party (PNP) caretaker and, like Golding in Central St Catherine, she converted it into a "caan lose" political stronghold.
Career politicians have captured democracies here, there, and everywhere, and have converted them into oligarchies ruled by a small political class which believes it has a natural right to rule. An oligarchy is a form of government in which the ruling power is concentrated in the hands of a few people. Previously, it was mostly an aristocracy which provided the rulership of oligarchies. An aristocracy is government by a privileged minority or upper class, usually of inherited wealth and social position. The political class, centred on career politicians and the political party, are the new aristocrats.
non-career politicians
There is no way on earth that a non-career politician, in the present order of things, can become head of Government in Jamaica and many other 'democratic' places. It is just about impossible to get elected as a member of parliament, or directly to the presidency, as in the United States, without being a member of a dominant political party. And there are usually just two, or at most three, of these in a 'democracy'.
The political parties will not generally allow people who have not 'served their dues' to rise to the top of their leadership. And there is pretty good empirical evidence from political science that it is not the brightest and the best and those of the highest integrity that generally survive the internal cut-throat competition and rise to the top in political parties. Factors like loyalty, ruthlessness, wiliness, and, yes, genes, matter more.
The UK newspaper, The Independent, reported on August 31 that "more than a quarter of the candidates chosen by Britain's political parties to fight next year's general election have no experience of any career other than politics, a study of their backgrounds has revealed".
Further, "The survey shows that a greater-than-ever number are political professionals who have gone directly from university into a political job as an adviser or researcher, and are now in line to enter Parliament". And many sitting MPs are long-term politicians with politics as their main, if not only, life engagement.
Someone should run the numbers and profiles for Jamaica. But while we wait, a news item carried by The Gleaner a couple of Fridays ago had the long-serving parliamentarian Derrick Smith saying "my career is not yet over". Smith, suffering from ill health which cost him a ministerial appointment, is quitting as a deputy leader of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), a position which he has held for 15 years. However, he is not stepping down as MP. "I will be continuing as MP until I decide to quit," he has declared.
Meanwhile, the 37 year-old Andrew Holness, seeking to consolidate a career in politics, which began as an aide to Edward Seaga, threw his hat in the ring to replace Smith but has subsequently withdrawn his candidacy, no doubt under counsel from party elders that "is not so the system work", leaving the career politician, Desmond McKenzie, as sole candidate.
the professionalisation of politics
The professionalisation of politics is full of dangers. The imperative of staying elected 'poisons' the democratic process. Long before he himself was elected president of the United States, Ronald Reagan noted in 1973, "one thing our founding fathers could not foresee was a nation governed by professional politicians who had a vested interest in getting re-elected. They probably envisioned a fellow serving a couple of hitches and then looking forward to getting back to the farm."
First president, George Washington, certainly felt that way - and lived that way. In his article, 'Some Thoughts on Career Politicians', well-known black conservative scholar of political economy, Thomas Sowell, noted that, "Whatever the problems faced by the country, the number one priority of elected officials is to get re-elected. Nothing does that better than handing out money from the public treasury.Most of the founders of this country had day jobs for years. They were not career politicians.
"George Washington, who took pride in his self-control, lost his temper completely when someone told him that a decision he was going to make could cost him re-election as president. He blew up at the suggestion that he wanted to be president, rather than serving as a duty when he would rather be back home.
"Power is such a dangerous thing," Sowell argues, "that ideally it should be wielded by people who don't want to use power, who would rather be doing something else, but who are willing to serve a certain number of years as a one-time duty, preferably at the end of a career doing something else.
"What about all the experience we would lose? Most of that is experience", Sowell quite correctly concludes, "in creating appearances, posturing, rhetoric, and spin - in a word, deception. We need leaders with experience in the real world, not experience in the phoney world of politics."
The Senate in our Constitution was envisaged as a council of appointed wise persons, an Upper House, distanced from the cut and thrust of competitive politics. In practice, the Senate is packed with party loyalists, career politicians and trade unionists from party-affiliated unions. P.J. Patterson bravely tried independent senators but soon reverted to the practice of appointing only members of the political class from his party's tribe.
Only career politicians could have built Jamaica's garrisons. And it will take politicians who are prepared to sacrifice political careers to dismantle them. With the senior leadership of the political parties corked with career politicians, (almost an inevitability, as we have seen), hope is not bright.
violence from the garrisons
A great deal of the country's crime and violence flows out of the garrisons and from the process of political tribalisation, but it is frightening to see how the oligarchic political class can fiercely bond when common interests over the right to rule are at stake. Last Sunday veteran journalist Earl Moxam rebroadcast on his programme That's a Rap (RJR FM 94) the 1996 programme The Politics of Crime which featured the then leaders of the PNP, JLP and National Democratic Movement (NDM). Patterson and Seaga linked arms and steered away from the crime/politics connection, which every study and report on the matter has confirmed, from past into present.
Patterson opted for the drug trade explanation. Seaga preferred the poverty explanation. The president of the upstart NDM, falling outside the political class oligarchy, bluntly spoke the truth about the role of political tribalism in crime and violence. That president is now prime minister, having reverted to the JLP from the stalled NDM to continue his career in politics and rising to the leadership of the party, and has adopted a substantially different posture on the matter.
If the career politician Golding is not prepared for the JLP to lose the next election, he can do very little about Jamaica's most fundamental problems, which, if not created by, have been at least severely aggravated by the 'poison' of career politics. But he will be under the most intense pressure to act to keep the party in power by all available means. He himself is guaranteed re-election to his seat, made ultra-safe by another career politician, to continue his political career from the position of leader of the Opposition if the party loses the election.
Martin Henry is a communications consultant. Feedback may be sent to medhen@gmail.com or columns@gleanerjm.com.