Percival Noel James Patterson celebrated his 90th birthday on Thursday, April 10, having spent his entire life in service to his homeland and beyond. Before taking the helm as Prime Minister from 1992 to 2016, he distinguished himself as Foreign Minister during the 1970s. This was a seminal period in international trade and pitted the post-colonial countries of Africa, Caribbean, and the Pacific against the European powers, set to alter the axis of the power relations to a more just and equitable distribution of global output. PJ Patterson was chairman of the ACP/EEC Ministerial Conference and led those negotiations to the historic signing of the Lomé Conventions.
Scholars have hailed the tenacity and skills of Mr. Patterson, and the re-thinking which introduced some innovative and ground-breaking moves towards more equitable trade and aid relations. In historicizing the Agreement, Rafael Sakr from Cambridge University spoke of its “unique centrality” in providing a development framework that significantly altered, even if imperfectly so, the power imbalance in trade relations. That undoubtedly will go down as one of Mr. Patterson’s most enduring legacies, not only to Jamaica but to countries that suffered through the indignity of slavery and colonialism, even if the ignominy of the oppressors bears no reprobation through some form of reparative justice.
In his stellar career as a nation builder, Mr. Patterson, I believe, demonstrated a passion for justice and equality, which not even his most ardent critic can deny. We should very well subject his 14 years as Prime Minister to the most robust of critique, and we can play politics all we want with Finsac, crime, and the economy, during his stewardship. But in the building of a nation, we have a solemn duty to lift all our leaders above the political fray — which we only do at the time of their passing — and credit them for the positives which they have contributed in their commitment to national development. In the heat of a political campaign, we can go low, but we can also go high on any objective assessment of our elder statesmen.
Mr. Patterson attempted a concerted assault on the psyche of the Jamaica people by promoting the Values and Attitudes programme. In historicizing his contribution, as we must for all our leaders, outside of Marcus Garvey and Michael Manley, it is by far the most pivotal attempt at establishing a social movement for the decolonization of a person and of a people.
Values and Attitudes, I believe, is precisely what Garvey’s mission was about, and I dare say, it must be the precursor to a fuller and better understanding and appreciation of the reparation movement in which Mr. Patterson is front and centre, through the PJ Patterson Institute for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy and Minister Grange is leading through the National Council on Reparations.
If we lose sight of Mr. Patterson’s contribution in that regard, then we are, indeed, a nation in crisis and history may not be kind in absolving us.
