Flashback: 1980 general election, Ballot, blood and bullets

Howard Campbell, Gleaner Writer

Today is the 30th anniversary of the bloodiest election in Jamaican history.

The 1980 national polls represented a major transition in Jamaica's politics as the socialist government of Prime Minister Michael Manley was swept from power by the conservative Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), led by Edward Seaga. The parties were fiercely divided along ideological lines.

The JLP won 51 of the 60 parliamentary seats. It was a devastating loss for Manley's People's National Party (PNP), which won the 1972 and 1976 elections in convincing fashion.

Kenneth Baugh was one of the victorious JLP candidates. In an interview with The Gleaner four years ago, he said Jamaica could not afford another four years of PNP policies.

"It was a great relief for the people because things had gone very wrong in the country," said Baugh, who is currently Jamaica's deputy prime minister.

"The economy had failed and there was the danger of us becoming a one-party state."

Delano Franklyn was a youth activist and PNP supporter in 1980. Though the mood in Jamaica seemed to be turning against Manley, he believed at the time that the PNP had done enough to secure a third term.

"I believe their policies had opened the social consciousness and were far more attractive than any other alternative," he said.

"I found the JLP's message ideologically and philosophically combative to Jamaica."

Gang violence erupted throughout Jamaica leading up to the election, with the police reporting over 700 murders. Two bloody incidents took place in April.

The first took place at a dance on Gold Street in central Kingston where five persons were killed. The second occurred at the Hannah Town Police Station in west Kingston which was attacked by thugs, resulting in the deaths of two men, one of them a police officer.

Finally

After months of speculation, Manley announced the date of the election on October 5 at a rally in Sam Sharpe Square, Montego Bay.

Veteran journalist John Maxwell, who attended the event, recalled the scene in a 2009 interview with The Gleaner.

"It was the biggest crowd I have ever seen. I thought a third of the electorate was there," Maxwell said.

The mammoth crowd inspired Manley to famously declare: "One hundred and fifty thousand strong can't be wrong!"

The previous day, pollster Carl Stone had predicted a landslide victory for the JLP. He had them winning as many as 40 seats.

The JLP had coined a catchy campaign phrase, 'Deliverance is Near', which Baugh said summed up the mood in the opposition camp.

"We had high motivation. At the start of the year, the polls showed us in the lead, and by the middle of the year we had gone into heavy campaigning," he said.

The violence that gripped the country for most of the year spilled over to Nomination Day, October 14. Roy McGann, the PNP's candidate for East Rural St Andrew, and his bodyguard, acting Corporal Errol White, were killed in Gordon Town.

Four days later, on National Heroes Day, two children were killed in Top Hill district, St Elizabeth, where supporters of the two parties clashed.

The election loss was a massive blow for the PNP. Some of its senior members, including P.J. Patterson, Howard Cooke, and Arnold Bertram, lost their seats in Parliament.

Jamaica's fifth prime minister

Seaga, a United States-born, Harvard-educated anthropologist, was sworn in as Jamaica's fifth prime minister on November 1. One of his first acts was to expel the Cuban Ambassador to Jamaica, Ulises Estrada, and sever diplomatic ties with Cuba.

Delano Franklyn later became a lawyer and then a PNP senator and state minister for foreign affairs.

He remains a committed Manley disciple who has revisited the former prime minister's speeches in two books. Though he still believes Jamaica would have benefited from another PNP term in 1980, the people's will was decisive on October 30, 1980.