The private sector asked me to help remove Manley – Gerry Grindley.
ARETIRED Jamaican businessman has recounted how he was enlisted by private-sector leaders in the late 1970s to help remove Michael Manley as prime minister after the then People’s National Party (PNP) leader openly embraced former Cuban President Fidel Castro and his communism ideology.
Leonard ‘Gerry’ Grindley, former chairman of the Grimax Group of Companies, revealed that initially, he refused but later relented and helped to guide Edward Seaga and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) to a landslide victory in 1980.
“The private sector, they came to me and said, ‘The country is falling apart, and, therefore, we want you to do something. We want you to take on the JLP’,” he recounted.
Grindley asserted, too, that by embracing Castro and communism, Manley abandoned his politics of inclusion and participation and revealed how this caused their friendship to sour.
“He proposed the politics of participation. It was a beautiful period, a wonderful period,” Grindley said, acknowledging how the utterances of the charismatic PNP leader resonated with him.
“He was such a wonderful person for government and for the country. He loved the country so much that I felt that he was talking my language and I was talking his language,” he continued.
Grindley, a respected advertising executive at the
time, revealed that he was introduced to Manley in 1968 by a private-sector leader who told him, “I want you to help promote this man.”
“At the time, the PNP, and Michael Manley, was, I would say, in a stupendous growth. He was being looked at for leadership,” he said.
According to Grindley, that marked the beginning of a friendship and business relationship that saw Manley successfully challenge for the leadership of the PNP to his electoral victory in 1972.
But by the mid-’90s, he asserted, Manley’s message began to shift.
TAKE ON THE JLP
“He went and made friends with Castro, and the whole thing changed. Jamaica was like a little running hill ... it was no good. All sorts of things were happening in the country,” Grindley said.
“I told Manley, I said, ‘Look, we can’t go on any further because the whole private-sector thing is down, the country is down ... you can’t go on like that’.”
That’s when Grindley said he came under increased pressure from the private sector to help unseat the PNP.
“From 1977, people came down and said, ‘Well, you have to tell Manley goodbye and take on the JLP’, and that is what happened,” he said.
Manley and the PNP boycotted the snap election in 1983 before he was again sworn in as prime minister in 1989.
He retired from representational politics in 1992 before his passing in 1997.