The North East St. Ann by election was a minor triumph for Jamaican democracy. For once there were no cries of bogus voting. And from all reports violence was almost non-existent, continuing the trend towards peaceful campaigns that has became quite noticeable over the past few elections. We’ve come a long way baby since the near civil war of 1980.

Equally impressive was the continuing accuracy of the Stone polls, with the actual party percentages almost exactly matching Marc Wignall’s final predictions. There has never been an election where the Stone polls were not within the margin of error, and their record stands comparison with any political polling organization on earth. We take it for granted here, but not many countries have such a dependable way of judging the nation’s pulse. Another indication in my view that Jamaica is as democratically mature as any state outside the developed world.

This NDM suffered another humiliating defeat, and my heart goes out to its members. Whatever their mistakes, most of them are undoubted patriots who want the best for their country and were at least willing to put their money where their mouths were. I admire them for their efforts. My brain however says that the NDM was completely irrational in expecting Jamaicans to vote for it in large numbers when it has never stated clearly just what it stands for. Nobody with sense buys puss in a bag.

As for the actual result, it was clearly more a case of the PNP losing than the JLP winning.  Of course no one who has driven on St Ann’s pothole pitted roads in the past year could doubt that the PNP deserved to lose. For all the grand talk show rhetoric about party strategies and maneuvers, the main issue in Jamaican politics today is this – why can’t we tax payers have decent roads to drive on?

It was heartening to see that voters ignored the government’s hypocritical 2am-election-morning-crash-program road fixing. Perhaps the Jamaican electorate has finally gotten fed up with politicians that ignore their constituencies for years and then try to win re-election by filling a few potholes and running a few water pipes during the campaign.

But of course even bad governments get voted back in when the opposition seems worse. And in this by election the JLP for the first time in years presented at least a facade of competence. By all accounts it out campaigned the PNP both at the top and on the ground. Yet one swallow does not a summer make. The Labour party has made a good start at getting its house in order. But a decade of continuous JLP blundering and backstabbing is not going to be erased from the public’s memory by a single victory.

Perhaps the electorate is both sending a wake up call to the PNP and giving the JLP encouragement. Maybe voters are saying to P.J. Patterson that “you better start paying more attention to us or you’re going to lose the work”. And the message to Edward Seaga might be “keep doing what you’re doing and we might give you a chance”.

Mr. Seaga – who after all hasn’t had a moment like this in over 20 years – seems drunk with victory. For his arrogant assertion that it is up to the JLP to decide when the next elections will be held reeks of hubris and can do nothing but turn off the electorate. Jamaicans might have been glad for his hectoring exhortations in 1980, but times and styles change. And aggressively confrontational politics is about as popular today as kareebas and afros. A more humble and less strident “Uncle Eddie” would likely win far more votes than an irritatingly cantankerous “One Don”.

At any rate his assumption that the JLP is already home and dry and is now a government in waiting appears premature. The comparative situation in North East St Ann for 1997 and 2001 are as follows.

Extrapolated on a national seat by seat basis the following would obtain.

So if the swings in this by election are repeated nationwide the next general election will be too close to call. And based on their relative performances of PNP and JLP this is as it should be. Inept and corrupt as the present administration is, the opposition has given the public no reason to think it is any more capable or honest. Prominent members of both parties have had to be bailed out of their commercial incompetence by FINSAC. And all 60 MPs have colluded in this financial gang raping of the tax payer.

Jamaicans have moved beyond ideological and racial politics. Capitalist, socialist, third wayist, black, white or brown – none of that seems very relevant nowadays to the man on the street. What the nation wants is organizational competence - a government that can give us decent roads, good hospitals, reliable water and electricity supplies, and reasonably safe streets. As I recently heard a man exclaim hyperbolically – “I would vote for the klu klux klan if they showed me they could run the country properly!”.

Which is why to my mind the vote swings in this by election represent almost an ideal. Personally I don’t see how a one sided mandate in the next general election for either the PNP or JLP could benefit the country. For we have been there too many times before with nothing to show for it. Not since 1967 has the opposition got even half as many seats as the winning party, and that was the last administration during which the economy grew healthily and Jamaica’s murder rate was lower than the USA’s. Coincidentally or not the 1972 elections ushered in an era of alternating landslides, economic decline, and rising crime.

In my view the best chance Jamaica has of getting a good government is to give neither party a decisive victory the next time around. For massive mandates only seem to produce insufferably self-important ministers who forget that they hold their positions solely at the people’s behest. Even when well behind in the polls governments everywhere seem shocked when they get voted out. But slim majorities are constant reminders of democratic mortality and might give us rulers who profile less and work harder.

“When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully” Samuel Johnson once remarked. Perhaps the persistent thought that they could be voted out at any time would do the same for our governments. changkob@hotmail.com