Norman Manley (left) and Alexander Bustamante (Photo: AP)
April 4, 2025
The politics of nastiness
According to Google, a person who has a nasty personality is typically hateful or spiteful. And as one who has been the victim of nastiness in my relatively brief political career and decades-long sojourn in journalism, I know how it feels to be ridiculed, defamed, and ostracised.
Indeed, it has been said that anyone who dares to enter the field of politics or journalism (especially opinion journalism) must be thick-skinned, all the while possessing strong testicular fortitude. In other words, as one partisan hack puts it, one must have “the stomach of a John Crow” to be able to digest just about anything that is filthy and rotten while continuing to soar.
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In previous dispensations, long before the advent of social media, political platforms, and rum bars, verandahs as well as the streets were the usual venues for “suss” and other utterances designed to assassinate the characters of people who were not supporters of one’s political party. In some instances, aggrieved individuals have sought to get redress in the island’s courts, but for the most part, politicians have had to grin and bear it.
Now that the country has entered election mode, there has been an increasing level of nastiness on political platforms and in social media posts specifically designed to embarrass, vilify, and shame political representatives and candidates. Of course, this is not a new phenomenon, as one can go as far back as when our first two major political party leaders, Alexander Bustamante and Norman Manley, were arch-rivals, seeking the votes of Jamaicans.
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In the case of “Busta”, it was widely rumoured that, despite him claiming otherwise, he was semi-illiterate. There is the infamous joke about him spelling “bread” as “bred”, while his enemies insisted that it was his secretary, and ultimately his wife, Gladys Longbridge, who wrote those many letters which he dictated to The Gleaner editor that catapulted him into the public space.
Manley, in the meantime, was renamed Manlie by his detractors, and we could go on. Later on, Hugh Shearer was nicknamed Shearout (a name which spoke for itself) and Edward Seaga ended up with many sobriquets, chief of which were One Don and Ciaga, the latter referring to him allegedly being in league with the US’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to overthrow the socialist, deemed communist, regime of Michael Manley. Needless to say, Michael “Joshua” Manley was tarred and feathered as a communist lackey.
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Advisedly, one cannot freely describe or adumbrate the sleaze that has been hurled at former prime ministers Bruce Golding, PJ Patterson, and Portia Simpson Miller, not to mention our current prime minister and Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) Leader Andrew Holness and Opposition leader and People’s National Party (PNP) President Mark Golding, as some may well border on being extremely libelous or defamatory to repeat here.
One of the slurs that continues to do the rounds every election cycle has to do with whether a candidate or Member of Parliament (MP) has dual citizenship or a United States green card. Seaga was the first victim of this on the political hustings, which led to the now famous song, interestingly being adopted by Labourites, My Leader Born Ya.
Ironically, the tables have now been turned on the PNP, whose president continues to be targeted by Labourites as being “Marky British”, insinuating that he has British citizenship (which incidentally does not disqualify him from being an MP or prime minister).
This brings us, dear readers, to the vexing matter of hypocrisy, which is constantly infused in this parade of nastiness on political platforms, because, in the final analysis, it is a classic case of the pot cussing the kettle. The time has come for our political parties to settle this “birthright” issue once and for all so it does not continue to be a major distraction or bugbear. There should be a specific code of conduct and ethics signed by all candidates declaring their citizenship status, not just verbally, but by providing documentary evidence prior to a general election. Frankly, this continues to be an unnecessary distraction which becomes even more egregious when it takes on a racist tone, defying the ethos of our national motto “Out of many, one people”.
Civil society groups and other major stakeholders should also insist that parties publish their respective manifestos within a reasonable time frame. It has been customary for these manifestos to be published very close to the day of voting, which means that the public does not get sufficient chance to peruse and objectively analyse what is being offered. Without a doubt, such a move would help to get party supporters to move away from just “throwing words” at each other and getting down to the business of discussing policies rather than personalities.
Unfortunately, we have a mainly non-reading society, as most citizens depend on news bites, hearsay, suss, and propaganda. For this reason, it behoves the JLP and the PNP to produce their manifestos in both hard and soft copies. They should also release excerpts of the main issues in simple language. Another way to defuse the overwhelming amount of “platform tracing” and social media nastiness is for candidates as well as sitting MPs to be mandated by their parties to stage town hall meetings where prospective constituents can question them and seek to get meaningful clarification on policies and issues, and not be expected to simply rely on polemics and “politricks”.
In all of this, both Holness and Golding must rise above the fray and raise the bar, setting the example for meaningful discourse carried out in a civil and respectful manner. Needless to say, there is growing fear among well-thinking citizens that the current war of words and social media onslaught could well engender political violence as rabid, diehard partisans are likely to take their campaigns to vulgar extremes.
Finally, one of the most deleterious political actors out there are the JLP and PNP trolls.
Google describes a “troll” as someone who intentionally provokes or antagonises others by posting inflammatory or disruptive content with the aim of causing disruption or argument. While we are a democratic country and espouse freedom of expression, there ought to be certain limits to which trolls should be allowed to defame public officials, especially when their content is primarily fake news, misinformation, or disinformation. This is where the role of the political ombudsman should be widened to deal with such indiscretions or infractions.
To put it bluntly, time come for there to be a cessation or curtailment of the politics of nastiness that is pervading the land.
Lloyd B Smith has been involved full-time in Jamaican media for the past 49 years. He has also served as a Member of Parliament and Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives. He hails from western Jamaica where he is popularly known as the Governor. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or lbsmith4@gmail.com.
Lloyd B Smith
