Edward Seaga Jamaica Labor Party and his contribution to Jamaica Politics

Edward Philip George Seaga was born on May 28, 1930,  in Boston'.His 18-year-old Jamaican mother, Erna Alleta Maxwell,His father, 29-year-old salesman Phillip George Seaga (who could sell snow to an Eskimo) was a second-generation Lebanese-Jamaican. He graduated from Harvard in 1952 with a Bachelor of Arts in social relations.He had by then broadened his academic interest in rural folk life to include recording and producing its evolved urban musical form.Seaga's Gleaner writings brought him to the attention of founder and president of the opposition Jamaica Labour Party, Alexander Bustamante, whose emergence on the national scene owed much to his own strident letter writing (in the 1920s) against Jamaica's ruling colonial order.In 1959 Bustamante appointed Seaga to sit in the upper house of the Jamaican Legislative Assembly.In 1960 he was elected assistant secretary of the party, and two years later he was elevated to the post of secretary.Seaga served at the finance and planning post until the JLP lost power - after two successive terms .Seaga led the JLP to a massive electoral victory over Michael Manley and the PNP - and their "democratic socialist" experiment. Seaga became independent Jamaica's fifth prime minister.

Seaga and his government also undertook a pro-Western and particularly pro-US foreign policy stance. Seaga led other Anglo-Caribbean states in opposing the left-wing Maurice Bishop regime in Grenada, enthusiastically backing, after Bishop's demise, the October 1983 US invasion of the island. adapted from By Bernard Headley article Sunday, January 16, 2005