John Junor | Get the record straight on P.J. Patterson’s legacy

WESLEY MORRIS’ September 7 article on former Prime Minister P.J. Patterson’s tenure reads less like serious political analysis. His surgical cherry-picking of the 1992-1995 period is a masterclass in what Darrell Huff immortalised as How to Lie with Statistics.

When pundits resort to myopic three-year snapshots to indict transformational leadership, they expose more about their methodology than their target.

Under Patterson’s stewardship there was a massive increase in Jamaica’s per capita GDP between 1992 and 2006 as the World Bank data showed.

This wasn’t economic sleight-of-hand benefiting only the privileged few – the IMF itself acknowledged that income inequality actually compressed during the PNP administration, with the Gini coefficient shrinking from 0.56 to 0.46. Even the harshest critics were forced to admit the vast improvements on the quality of life in Jamaica.

The poverty level was chopped from 28.4 per cent in 1990 to 9.9 per cent by 2007. These aren’t statistical mirages, they represent thousands of Jamaican families yanked from destitution while Morris was spinning his historical fiction.

DEVASTATING TORPEDO

The most devastating torpedo to Morris’s thesis comes not from economists but from the people themselves. The electoral laws and system were repeatedly improved so that the people could deliver their verdict on the “Solid Achievements” in 1993, 1997, and 2002. Each time, they thundered back with electoral mandates that were unprecedented: reflecting the transformation of Jamaica’s electoral culture from one plagued by political violence to one where democratic continuity flourished and the gains in their living standards.

The Patterson administration reduced the high incidence of political violence to almost negligible levels, creating the peaceful democratic space that made genuine choice possible. Oppressed populations do not genuflect before their oppressors at the ballot box in free and fair elections. They choose leaders who transform their lived reality. Morris’s presumption to ignore the democratic wisdom of the Jamaican people betrays the arrogance underlying his entire diatribe.

The authentic Patterson legacy soars far beyond Morris’s tunnel-vision economics. Mr Patterson dismantled Jamaica’s feudal land ownership through Operation PRIDE and the Emancipation Lands Projects, seismic structural upheavals that shattered centuries of colonial calcification. The National Land Policy, and facilitation in the issue of land titles, his administration produced real not bureaucratic window-dressing; it was an earthquake that sought to topple the structural apartheid inherited from slavery and colonialism.

Let us look at some of the achievements, not mentioned in Morris’ article: the airport and seaport modernisation; the North Coast Highway and Highway 2000 programmes; the National Health Fund; the resurrection of the National Youth Service after a 12-year hiatus; the information technology metamorphosis; the PATH programme; the CHASE Fund, the Jamaica Social Investment Fund, The Universal Access Fund. They are architectural blueprints for Jamaica’s human and economic development.

Patterson’s housing revolution merits special recognition. Through innovative choreography with trade unions, Sugar Industry Housing Limited, and JAMALCO, his administration orchestrated enormous housing solutions islandwide, doubling the construction of houses in Portmore alone. This wasn’t political largesse, it was systemic change that embedded ordinary Jamaicans into their nation’s prosperity foundation.

Patterson masterfully navigated Jamaica’s exodus from formal IMF bondage by 1995, which entailed the successful passing of 13 consecutive quarterly tests. With the advent of the global market, and of negative NIR, Jamaica had no option but to undertake structural adjustment. Patterson’s administration sought to cushion the trauma through the very partnerships and programmes Morris callously dismisses. The contrast illuminates everything: Patterson severed Jamaica’s dependency chains while simultaneously constructing the social safety architecture that shielded the vulnerable during transition.

RESTORATION

Before he retired, Jamaica had been restored to a footing where it became acceptable in the capital markets. The institutions he created to ensure adequate oversight of financial entities and protect depositors and policy holders remained in place so that Portia Simpson Miller and Peter Phillips could perform resurrection surgery to the shattered economy they faced in 2012 on their return to governance.

History will regard kindly the Values and Attitudes Programme, designed to achieve an acceptable social order which would embrace the tenets of self-respect, tolerance and eventually eradicate political tribalism. This wasn’t therapeutic rhetoric; it was strategic recognition that structural transformation requires a cultural metamorphosis. It is now universally acknowledged that the partisan derailment has been to Jamaica’s detriment.

While Patterson towers as the architect of Jamaica’s modern infrastructure revolution, narratives contradicted by empirical evidence and electoral history still persist. Others might seek to build on the sound foundation he built, but his footprint remains indelible.

Patterson’s administration democratised access to land ownership, decent shelter, water, electricity, and telecommunications on revolutionary scale. These weren’t accidents, they were deliberate fruits of visionary leadership that understood development meant structural surgery, not superficial therapy.

Morris’s mask as “a concerned PNP member” convinces exactly no one. The impressive record and electoral triumphs cannot be blunted by distorted statistics to deny the progressive reform which Patterson championed. His methodology, quarantining three years of necessary structural adjustment while ignoring 14 years of transformational achievement, epitomises everything toxic about bias and prejudice over performance. The Jamaican people passed superior judgement in 1993, 1997, and 2002.

Between 95 and 2000, the number of motor vehicles had increased over 100 per cent, electricity usage by 35 per cent and by 2002 there were over one million cellular phones. They recognised progress when they witnessed it; repeatedly returning the leader who delivered land, housing, healthcare, education, with dignity. Morris can massage his selective three-year window indefinitely, but history, and the democratic will of the Jamaican people, have already delivered their irreversible verdict.

Patterson’s legacy will endure the master architect of modern Jamaica’s economic and social infrastructure, the leader who successfully shattered IMF dependency while laying foundations for sustained development. That legacy stands not on perverse benediction, but on documented achievement and democratic validation.

Let’s get the record right.

John Junor is former PNP cabinet minister. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com