Edward Seaga
Prime Minister of Jamaica who moved his country from dogmatic socialism to the political centre
EDWARD SEAGA, who has died on his 89th birthday, was elected Prime Minister of Jamaica in 1980 in a landslide victory for his conservative Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) over Michael Manley’s incumbent People’s National Party (PNP), and remained in power until 1989.
Manley’s time as Prime Minister, from 1972, had been one of dogmatic socialism at home and growing alarm in Washington and elsewhere. Policies which included strengthening ties with Cuba, nationalising the country’s foreign-owned bauxite mines and denouncing American imperialism bred concern among investors and led to a sharp decline in the economy. Food subsidies ended up causing shortages, and as Jamaican politics became more polarised, both main political parties aligned themselves with rival gun gangs.
The election campaign which brought Seaga to power was characterised by unprecedented violence in which the rival parties’ “armies’’, wielding machine-guns, assault rifles, pistols and machetes, took at least 700 lives. It took years for the island’s tourist industry to recover.
Eager to curry favour with the US, Seaga broke off relations with Cuba, took part in the 1983 US invasion of Grenada and started a programme of deregulation, tax reform, privatisation and tariff reduction. After several years of falling national income, exacerbated by a bad hurricane in 1980 and a general strike in 1985, the programme began to bear fruit, notwithstanding the destruction wrought by Hurricane Gilbert in 1988. Inflation and unemployment fell and the country returned to modest but steady economic growth.
Nevertheless, cuts in public spending led to a deterioration in social services and to complaints about education and public health. The country remained heavily indebted; unemployment remained high at nearly 24 per cent and gang violence continued, not helped by Seaga’s decision to repay his US sponsors by starting a war on marijuana, a move which backfired by opening the way for Jamaica to become the favoured trans-shipment point for Colombian cocaine. The majority of the
country’s 2.4 million population remained mired in poverty.
Born and educated in the US, Seaga had the reputation of being less at home with the ordinary islanders than the more charismatic Manley, and Jamaicans were said to find him autocratic, hectoring and dull. In 1989 voters returned Manley, reinvented as a chastened social democratic free-marketeer, to power. The JLP, of which Seaga continued as leader until 2005, remained out of power until 2007 when his successor, Bruce Golding, was elected as prime minister.
Edward Phillip George Seaga was born on May 28 1930 in Boston, Massachusetts, to Philip Seaga, a Jamaican businessman of Lebanese descent, and his wife Erna (née Maxwell), of mixed European and African descent. When Edward was still a baby they returned to Jamaica, where Edward was educated at Wolmer’s Boys’ School, Kingston, before taking a degree in Social Sciences at Harvard.
Returning to Jamaica, he embarked on research into local folklore, supervised the recording of an album of ethnic Jamaican music, and in 1959 set up his own record label, West Indies Recording Limited, which kick-started the ska boom of the early 1960s.
In 1959 Sir Alexander Bustamante, the founder of the centre-right JLP, appointed him to the body set up to draft a constitutional framework for the island’s move to independence from Britain. When the JLP won a majority in the first postindependence parliamentary elections in 1962, Seaga took his seat as MP for West Kingston, which he held for the next 43 years, and was subsequently appointed Minister of Development and Welfare.
Owing to his political commitments, he sold his record company, though he remained a great champion of the island’s ethnic music scene.
When the JLP were returned to power in 1967, Seaga was appointed minister of finance and planning, setting up the Jamaica stock exchange and the country’s first majority-owned commercial bank. Manley and the PNP won the 1972 election, and two years later Seaga became JLP leader.
As violence escalated, with frequent gunfights taking place between gangs supporting the rival political parties, in 1978 Seaga and Manley were somewhat awkward-looking participants in a “One Love Peace” concert staged by the reggae star Bob Marley. As Marley declared an end to the bloodshed, he joined the two men’s hands above his head, watched by the world’s media and, from the sidelines, by an unsavoury array of ghetto gunmen, their weapons abandoned – temporarily.
It was an extraordinary moment, but the peace did not last. In the ghettos of Kingston rival gangs – sponsored, however discreetly, by the rival political parties – continued to murder and intimidate in the run-up to the 1980 election, which ended in a 51-9 seat landslide for Seaga.
Three years later Seaga called a snap general election following Jamaica’s participation in the Grenada invasion, an election boycotted by Manley’s PNP. As JLP candidates were unopposed in most seats, voting only took place in six. As a result the party won all 60 constituencies on a nationwide “turnout” of just of 2.7 per cent.
As the 1989 election campaign got under way the desire to avoid another bloodbath prompted Seaga and Manley to sign a “peace treaty” committing them to cool their political rhetoric. Though, in the weeks immediately prior to the election, their pledge was honoured more in the breach than the observance, the violence was on a small scale compared with 1980.
The PNP won 45 of the 60 seats. The JLP under Seaga’s leadership failed to win another election and in 1993 was reduced to a rump of six seats. But Seaga was said to take comfort from the fact that his time in office had forced Manley and his successor PJ Patterson to embrace moderation, narrowing the ideological divide between the parties.
In 1965 Seaga he married Mitsy Constantine, a former television presenter and Miss Jamaica. The marriage was dissolved and in 1996 he married Carla Vendryes. She survives him with their daughter, and two sons and a daughter from his first marriage.
Edward Seaga, born May 28 1930, died May 28 2019