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When the JLP won a majority in the first post-independence 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. 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. 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. 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. In 1989 voters returned Manley, reinvented as a chastened social democratic free-marketeer, to power. The majority of the country’s 2.4 million population remained mired in poverty.īorn 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. 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.
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Nevertheless, cuts in public spending led to a deterioration in social services and to complaints about education and public health. It took years for the island’s tourist industry to recover. 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. Food subsidies ended up causing shortages, and as Jamaican politics became more polarised, both main political parties aligned themselves with rival gun gangs. 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. Manley’s time as Prime Minister, from 1972, had been one of dogmatic socialism at home and growing alarm in Washington and elsewhere. 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.