Sugar Shane look salt?
IN THE best of times, politics and principle will always step out to the same music, but the dance is usually awkward, laboured and laughable.
About 10 years ago, the Opposition People’s National Party (PNP) mercilessly hauled the Jamaica Labour Part (JLP) administration of 2007-2011 over hot coals in relation to Daryl Vaz, Gregory Mair, Michael Stern, Shahine Robinson, and later Everald Warmington, who were revealed as having dual-citizen status, although all were born in Jamaica.
They had all won their constituencies, were forced to give up mostly American citizen status, but later retook their seats in by-elections. In the meantime, expensive lawyers and the courts were involved in what many JLP supporters thought was a grand ploy to nullify the JLP’s four-seat advantage and hand back power to a demonstrably petulant PNP, whose leader could never quite recover from being psychologically discombobulated by the JLP win.
Now it turns out that in the by-election stewing over flames in South East St Mary, as of nomination day, the PNP’s Dr Shane Alexis, dubbed Sugar Shane for the political moment, was a Canadian citizen having no Jamaican passport. Under withering criticism and with the PNP political hypocrisy fully on display, Dr Shane Alexis, PNP candidate for South Eastern St Mary, is pumped after completing nomination on Monday, October 9. he has since moved half-heartedly to secure Jamaican citizenship.
Based on what we know of such a process and the time to completion, it is very likely that should Dr Alexis pull a rabbit out of a hat and snatch a win over the JLP’s Dr Norman Dunn, he would still not be the genuine article, that is, a fully documented Jamaican citizen.
In 1976, when the PNP struck upon one of its greatest political moves and had published the song, The Message by Neville Martin, one of the key lines was, “I and I born yah.” It also stressed that grandmother, grandfather and father were all the genuine ‘born yah’ Jamaicans.
The song was an obvious dig at the JLP’s Eddie Seaga, who was born in the USA but returned with his parents as a child and eventually renounced his American citizenship to demonstrate his total commitment to Jamaica and its political process.
On the South East St Mary slip-up by the PNP in relation to Dr Shane Alexis, it cannot to be reduced to lack of vetting or just rank stupidity on the part of the PNP secretariat. It has to be much more than that. Surely, the PNP never thought the JLP would just sit down and not do its opposition research? That is standard politics.
I am, therefore, forced to draw the conclusion that a ‘sensible’ PNP secretariat knew all along about the citizenship status of Dr Alexis, but because Sugar Shane was sent to South East St Mary as a sacrificial lamb in the JLP claiming and retaking its own territory, the PNP needed an escape clause to explain the loss. When it eventually happened.
PNP IN DISARRAY
Dr Shane Alexis has a Canadian passport and also a Grenadian one, the place where his mother was born. “This is mix-up and blender,” said Maxine, a resident of South East St Mary.
According to the mayor of Pt Maria, the JLP’s Richard Creary, when I spoke with him over a week ago, a poll completed before the death of the former MP for South East St Mary, Dr Winston Green, was showing the PNP significantly behind the JLP. I have not seen such a poll, and, on the assumption that it was commissioned by the PNP, if it does exist, the PNP would have a quite sound reason for suppressing such negative information about its chances.
According to Mr Creary’s reasoning, any positioning between the two parties would have since shown increases in the JLP favour, what with the active campaigning and all the noise and political fluff.
But, in the constituency of doctors even with the JLP’s Dr Norman Dunn being the busybody that he is, one gets the sense that Dr Alexis is half in and half out. When he said in an interview, in borrowing a term from Michelle Obama, “When they go low, we go high,” is he at all aware of the PNP’s
antecedents on pontificating on dual-citizenship matters?
Both political parties are not even pretending that the race is any longer a local matter. To the JLP, it is a referendum mostly for the economic policies of the JLP administration. Add to that the long history of South East St Mary, with multiple JLP electoral wins, the JLP in the driver’s seat of governance, and the PNP still crusty around the collar, a significant JLP win cannot be seen as any surprise.
To the Opposition PNP, an unlikely victory there is needed