Mark Wignall | This has happened before

“Andrew gwine lose him seat,” she said to me. It was September 3, election night, and many were nervous as would be expected. Count me among them.

“No, pretty girl,” I said. “It’s just an imbalance of votes as they come in. And the count. Sometimes it gives the wrong indicator.” I explained it to her in some detail what must have been happening in West Central St Andrew.

Reminds me of way way back. In the ‘war year’ of 1980. Guns were barking. Dogs were in hiding. The streets of West Central St Andrew were murderous even moreso than the tumultuous West Kingston and the fearsome East Kingston, and places like Spanish Town, a veritable wasp nest.

It is East Central Kingston and we are listening to the vote count. The JLP’s Ryan Peralto vs the PNP’s political phenomenon, Prime Minister Michael Manley. At one stage of the count, the numbers are bringing about panic. Peralto is ahead.

Home phones, the only type available, begin to work overtime. Remember now, technologically-wise, the times were dark. Colour TV in Jamaica was only five years old. An adolescent named Andrew Holness is seven. I am headed to thirty.

The prevailing rumour and the most desired sentiment existing at that time is that the country needs Manley in Parliament to fully explain the social and economic ravages of democratic socialism from 1974. A Seaga-Manley parliamentary face-off must happen.

The Peralto vote must be squashed even if it has to be engineered via the electoral office. Rumours and more rumours. Just kept on spreading. As would be expected, Manley eventually won in his constituency.

Surely my amigo Paul Buchanan, of the PNP, a political historian, knows this in his recent West Central match with the PM. Paul, you needed to deliver solid body blows instead of the feather jabs you produced. Something like you did in 2011 in West Rural St Andrew.

But maybe the gentleman is clutching at the best bit of political relevance that is available to him. To let that slip away is to give Buchanan his agonising race to an electoral blank page.

DARYL VAZ DIDN’T SAY OUR LOUD

MP for West Portland and perennially active Transport MInister Daryl Vaz did an interview where he cited ‘numbers’ as the main reason for his extremely active wife and MP for East Portland losing her seat to lawyer Isat Buchanan.

My PNP friend and regular reader living in Atlanta has a more controversial view, something that Daryl would be uncomfortable to discuss.

“The JLP encouraged and enabled racism, which cost them, not the election, but a good MP. Warmington’s terrible attacks on Mark Golding and his skin colour hurt the JLP. By all accounts Mrs. Vaz was a good MP, hard working, caring, and diligent, yet she lost to Mr. Buchanan.

“But let’s be clear about something. I know we prefer to hide it. In Jamaica, Ann-Marie Vaz is considered a ‘white’ woman by Jamaican standards, so the poison Warmington set caught her. According to the standards set by Warmington, we can’t have white people elected to political office in Jamaica. The voters fell for Warmington’s political idiocy.”

It is most problematic to conclude that Ann-Marie’s skin colour alone contributed to her constituency loss. The talk I heard in the weeks leading up the election was that ‘Isat have a special plan to dislodge her”. During that time, I was also hearing negatives about Dr Charles and her “lack of care”.

I bought into the Charles’s negatives but chose not to believe those about Vazimply because I definitely sensed the negatives in Charles but did not sense it in Ann-Marie. It matters quite little now. They both lost.

ROADS ARE FALLING APART ALREADY

Let us not be politically naive and believe that the few roads hurriedly rescued by the NWA in the weeks before election were expected to last until Christmas. On Paddington Drive months ago, road repairs were carried out. The supervisor was a Chinese national.

The guttering near to the sidewalk was made of cement. The tarred area came flush with the concrete, which meant that no running water could come between the two surfaces and cause lifting. The repairs on my road in Havendale have begun to fall apart. Which is longer than I expected it to last.

SO, WHAT MADE HIM WIN?

My PNP friend wrote, “The PNP did a good job campaigning. They created a good vibe with voters. The PNP were energetic in campaigning and passionate. The JLP lumbered along. In the debates, the JLP were roundly mashed up. Holness was lost for words. He was unimpressive and lacked any mental grit. Golding made him look like a mental lightweight. Where the PNP was not good was on election day. They lacked organisation and did not run a tight ship on election day and get their voters to vote, and it cost them. They had the JLP on the ropes but could not deliver the knockout punch.”

I believe that the JLP won to the same extent that voters saw in Holness something representing themselves. That feeling was quite big when Portia was PM. “I see myself in her,” said a relative of mine in 2006.

No judgement of Holness is made without a healthy appreciation for his faults. I have not spoken with a single Jamaican who has not admitted that Holness is weak on dealing with corruption. And yet I have never heard anyone, outside of PNP diehards, pinning it as almost criminal on him.

Holness won because in age, he is closer to the median age of the voting population than Golding is. He won because some voters saw positive change in the country’s infrastructure in the last nine years. People liked what they saw. What there was to hate was secondary. Holness won because some people believe that he has more in him to complete as prime minister. That last one is key.

Mark Wignall is a political and public affairs analyst. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and mawigsr@gmail.com.