ANDREW Holness in 1997 became the youngest man to be elected to Parliament when he won the West Central St. Andrew seat from Dr. warren Blake of the People's National Party.
Mr. Holness speaks below about the financial challenges of entering representational politics with The Sunday Gleaner's Daraine Luton.
"I entered politics at 25 years old, three months before the December 1997 election. I had no money or substantial source of income to rely on. Fortunately, I had a benefactor who saw my potential, encouraged me to enter and committed to provide funding for the campaign. The campaign for me was about two months, and I recalled doing a budget for only essential expenditure which came out to $2.5 million at the time.
"Regardless of the commitment for funding, I was worried because in my mind $2.5 million was a large sum of money. It may surprise many persons that only $600,000 was spent on the December 1997 campaign, because that was the extent of the money we managed to raise.
"I later realised that an adequately-funded campaign may not necessarily be a good thing. The more money you have in your campaign, the less efficiently you use it, and the more you tend to substitute money for person-to, person campaign work.
"As it turned out, my severely underfunded campaign was actually a benefit to me, because it forced me to have greater engagement with the voters which ultimately mobilised them on my behalf. I later learned that some campaigns for election ran as much as $10 million and what is worse, they still lost the election.
MANAGEMENT TEAM
"In 2000, I set out to put in place a management team with a fund-raising committee. However, very few persons were willing to serve given the violent nature of the constituency and the fact that they might be victimised by serving for an Opposition MP. Corporate donations were particularly difficult to secure because they are heavily competed for by established MPs. Since then, we have set up a charitable organisation to raise funds for welfare issues in the constituency and we hold a bi-annual charity dinner.
"Young persons seeking to enter representational politics should be prepared to meet a campaign cost exceeding a minimum of $3 million. They should also be prepared for the recurrent expenditure of running the constituency outside of a campaign which can exceed $4 million yearly."
