KY­RON REG­IS

ky­ron.reg­is@guardian.co.tt

The longest serv­ing Prime Min­is­ter in the his­to­ry of Ja­maica (1992 - 2006), Per­ci­val James (PJ) Pat­ter­son has called for a new kind of lead­er­ship for the cur­rent era

Speak­ing vir­tu­al­ly on a pan­el at the NGC Bo­cas Lit Fest 2020, Pat­ter­son read from his book ti­tled “My Po­lit­i­cal Jour­ney” say­ing: “The old­er or­der, the closed, dis­tant and au­thor­i­tar­i­an sys­tems of gov­er­nance is be­ing forced to give way to a struc­ture, which is in­clu­sive, re­spon­si­ble and ac­count­able.”

Pat­ter­son was ex­press­ing the need to find a new par­a­digm for gov­er­nance in the 21st- cen­tu­ry Caribbean space.

He ar­gued that there is a myth that so­ci­ety has adopt­ed, that in­sists on min­is­ters de­ter­min­ing pol­i­cy and pub­lic ser­vants im­ple­ment­ing. How­ev­er, Pat­ter­son said: “I don’t know of any pol­i­cy that has ever been de­vel­oped with­in a min­istry af­ter the elec­tions, where the staff of that min­istry is not some­how in­volved in the evo­lu­tion of the pol­i­cy for that par­tic­u­lar min­istry.”

Pat­ter­son de­clared that if it is in­sist­ed up­on that pub­lic ser­vants im­ple­ment with­out be­ing apart of the for­ma­tion of the po­lices, the ex­e­cu­tion process of rolling out such poli­cies would be “sub­ject to ab­ject fail­ure.”

Ac­cord­ing to Pat­ter­son, so­ci­ety is in search for the build­ing of what he would like to call a “par­tic­i­pa­to­ry democ­ra­cy.” He de­scribed this type of sys­tem as one where the re­la­tion­ships be­tween peo­ple and their gov­ern­ment is not one that oc­curs on­ly at elec­tion time.

The for­mer Ja­maican PM con­tin­ued: “You must have a will­ing­ness to lis­ten, to hear, to un­der­stand what peo­ple are say­ing and not al­ways the telling them what they should do or what they shouldn’t do be­cause un­less there is an ac­cep­tance in the coun­try which sub­scribes to a de­mo­c­ra­t­ic so­ci­ety, you are go­ing to find fail­ure in the ac­cep­tance and ex­e­cu­tion of im­por­tant pol­i­cy guide­lines.”

How­ev­er, when con­sid­er­ing the his­tor­i­cal colo­nial in­flu­ence on the lead­er­ship style of the Caribbean au­thor­i­ties, Pat­ter­son con­tend­ed that when he re­vis­its his­to­ry, he re­alised that the ex­tent to which Caribbean peo­ple were in­flu­enced and sub­ject to an out­side per­sua­sion in their own de­vel­op­ment - this has cul­ti­vat­ed what Caribbean lead­ers and peo­ple can do for them­selves to a con­sid­er­able ex­tent.

Pat­ter­son al­so ad­vo­cat­ed for lead­ers who would take the time to from mean­ing­ful friend­ships with oth­er lead­ers, not­ing that it was the fail­ure of such a re­la­tion­ship be­tween Er­ic Williams, Grant­ley Adams and Nor­man Man­ley that led to the fail­ure of the fed­er­a­tion.

Al­so speak­ing on the pan­el with Pat­ter­son, was Alis­sa Trotz, Pro­fes­sor of Caribbean Stud­ies at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to and the Di­rec­tor of Women and Gen­der Stud­ies. Trotz agreed with Pat­ter­son’s re­marks con­cern­ing the pow­er of lead­ers that lis­ten, not­ing that it is “some­thing that we seem to have lost in the Caribbean, we have a lot of, what we call in Guyana ‘hard earsness’ go­ing on right now.”

Trotz al­so con­tend­ed that the lead­er­ship par­a­digm in the Caribbean is de­formed. She ar­gued: “We are still deal­ing with the lega­cy of a de­formed mod­el of a heirar­chi­cal re­la­tion­ship be­tween the rulers and the ruled and the lead­ers and led and even say­ing it in that way should sort of ask us to take a clos­er look at what it means to be Caribbean in the con­tem­po­rary world to­day.”

Mean­while, adding to the pan­el dis­cus­sion was the for­mer At­tor­ney Gen­er­al of Be­lize God­frey Smith who echoed the im­por­tance of Pat­ter­son’s com­ments on lead­ers cul­ti­vat­ing re­la­tion­ships.

Speak­ing about this in light of the re­la­tion­ship with Mau­rice Bish­op (for­mer Grena­di­an PM) and Bernard Coard (for­mer Grena­di­an deputy PM who shot Bish­op), Smith said that when com­mu­ni­ca­tion and trust de­te­ri­o­rates it “leads to ab­ject dis­as­ter.”

Smith said in the past, the Caribbean saw an emer­gence of tru­ly trans­for­ma­tive lead­er­ship - he ref­er­enced, Man­ley as a po­lit­i­cal fig­ure that dis­played this type of lead­er­ship.

He not­ed that this trans­for­ma­tion­al lead­er­ship came from the leader’s de­sire to trans­form the so­ci­ety in which they were domi­ciled to make it bet­ter for all peo­ple.