No other leader since Jamaica's Independence has influenced the political landscape more profoundly than Michael Manley. Even today, some 12 years after his death, the mere mention of his name evokes respect, inflames passions and sparks controversies.

Delano Franklyn, who has developed a reputation for documenting important aspects of Jamaica's political and corporate life, recently launched his fifth book, Michael Manley: The Politics of Equality. The book is a compilation of all of Manley's budget speeches spanning the period 1969-1991. On the whole, we Jamai-cans are not good at preserving our history. And unwritten memories, at best, seldom survive more than one generation. As such, Franklyn's contribution is significant.

Budget speech

The collection of speeches is important for four reasons. First, for Manley, the budget speech was not simply an occasion for announcing a national plan. It was a platform for unveiling social and economic analysis; a pulpit for preaching his ideas; a cinema for projecting a vision of Jamaica on to the consciousness of its people.

Second, during the 1970s, for the first time the country's history, budget speeches were not seen as a drab affair to be witnessed exclusively by the news media, number-crunchers and political pundits. Ordinary Jamaicans saw themselves as a part of the democratic process and would turn on their radios for the event. And in a parliament of desk-thumpers, rabble rousers and incorrigible hecklers, it provided the perfect setting for the display of wit and verbal showmanship. Never before in Parliament was language more sublime or rhetoric more powerful than when Manley took the podium. His deliveries, as Franklyn points out in the introduction of the book, were sometimes "extremely long - four to five hours on average". Yet, Jamaicans were enthralled.

Movement of ideas

Third, the collection is not a static picture. It portrays the movement of ideas and the changing mood of the nation over a period of almost two decades - from a radical nationalism to the revival of regionalism; from a defiant embrace of democratic socialism to a calm acceptance of uninhibited capitalism. The title given to the speeches by Franklyn captures succinctly the colourful procession of ideas - "Society in Crisis," "Better Must Come", "Unleashing the potential" - through time.

Fourth, it reveals much about the character and views of Manley the politician. It is clear that Manley was not a man who accepted the status quo. In his first budget speech in 1969, against the background of an annual average economic growth rate of six per cent over the preceding decade, he declared: "It is true that we are in the middle of a great spurt of the construction of alumina production facilities in the bauxite industry. It is true that the tourist industry continues to expand ... but what is on the other side of the coin? It is also true that unemployment has risen from 13 per cent to 18 per cent. It is reliably estimated that some 130,000 Jamaican human beings of working age can find no work. But worse than that, it is estimated over 30 per cent of young people between the ages of 15 and 20 are without work."

Increasingly poor

Jamaica, at the time, was experiencing "growth but not development". Per capita GDP was growing at an impressive rate of 4.5 per cent per year, however, the greater share of the income was going into the bank accounts of the wealthiest people in the country. The poor, on the other hand, were getting more numerous and more desperate. It was this that Manley confronted. He approached it with zeal and conviction. At a minimum, "One the primary purposes of a politician (is) to illuminate the hidden corners of misery," he asserted, and at best, "the politician must devise a strategy through which misery can be banished."

Undoubtedly, it was that interpretation of the role of the politician that inspired Manley in his first term as prime minister to introduce social legislation and programmes on a scale never seen before in the country's history - minimum wage, maternity leave with pay, free education from the primary to the tertiary level and a series of housing projects, to name a few. In the process, a mighty upheaval was taking place: the strong connection between colour and class was being loo-sened and the distribution of income was becoming less skewed. The fact that the transformation was being led by a man who had benefited from his colour was a wound to the heart of the very class from which he had emerged, and it is a phenomenon that was both "creative and tragic". Indeed, during his two-term administration, spanning eight years, with the exception of 1972, the economy experienced negative growth.

'Development without growth'

It was clear in 1980 that the nation was once again in crisis. Yes, there was greater equality, however, the country had experienced "development without growth", which in the long run is unsustainable. Manley suffered a massive defeat at the polls.

Yet, when he once again became prime minister in 1989, he was willing to admit that he had made mistakes with some of the strategies. He then openly accepted the free-market model.

It was the Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, who once said: "Mere political action is insufficient if it is not preceded by a transformation of the very structure of the society and by an examination of the assumptions on which it is based." This is perhaps why Manley's Jamaica "never achieved growth with development".

Cedric Wilson is an economist who specialises in market regulations. He may be contacted at conoswil@hotmail.com or columns@gleanerjm.com.