Born: 1945, Jamaica
Copyright (c) by The H. W. Wilson Company. All rights reserved.
Born into a working-class home in rural Jamaica, Portia Simpson-Miller, sometimes called Sista P by her supporters, has risen through the political ranks to become her country’s eighth prime minister since it gained independence from Great Britain, in 1962—and the first woman to hold the office. Simpson-Miller won the post by an overwhelming margin in a February 2006 election among delegates for the party she has belonged to her entire political career, the once staunchly socialist and now left-of-center People’s National Party (PNP). As a minister of parliament for close to 24 of the last 30 years, she has demonstrated an intense dedication to her local constituents in South West St. Andrew, an impoverished and violence-torn district of the country’s capital, Kingston, where Simpson-Miller regularly wins more than 90 percent of the vote. “Anything I can do to make life better for the majority of the Jamaican people who are poor, for the working poor, or wherever there is injustice, I will do,” Simpson-Miller told Crystal Keels Manhertz for Network (Fall 2000, on-line), the alumni magazine of the Union Institute and University in Miami, Florida, where Simpson-Miller earned her undergraduate degree, in 1997, when she was about 52. “Certainly I feel that I am supposed to be the voice of the voiceless in the corridors of power.” Simpson-Miller’s success is, in fact, predicated upon the loyalty she shows to her constituency and her party without sacrificing her political autonomy. “She doesn’t ask anybody for favors,” as the journalist John Maxwell told Dwight Bellanfante for the Kingston Sunday Observer (September 11, 2005, on-line), “she’s not in anybody’s pocket, she’s an independent person not a parasite.” (Some isolated reports paint a contrasting picture, with Simpson-Miller figured as closely tied to the violent gangs that terrorized Jamaica and even parts of the U.S., particularly during the 1970s and 1980s; reasonable grounds also exist for doubting the legitimacy of some of the electoral results in her constituency, where turnout once topped 105 percent.) “I draw my strength from the Jamaican people,” she told Manhertz. “Even in moments of frustration, if I should go out, whether it is to the pharmacy, the supermarket, on the street—people come up to me and say ‘You are doing a good job, keep it up.’ They embrace me with a beautiful smile, a gentle touch. That is where I draw my sustenance. As long as they are strong, I will be strong, because the strength comes from them.”
Simpson-Miller was born Portia Simpson on December 12, 1945 in the small, rural town of Wood Hall in Jamaica’s St. Catherine’s Parish, the largest and second-most populous parish in Jamaica, according to the island’s 2001 census. One of eight children, she attended the Marlie Hill Primary School, in the parish of Manchester, and then, in Kingston, St. Martin’s High School, where she first began working in politics. As an adult she took jobs as a secretary and for social service organizations, according to her official profile on the Jamaican government’s Web site. From 1974 to 1976 she served on the municipal council for the Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation, the capital city’s governing body. Her second year on the town council was marked by political gun battles, principally between the PNP and their rivals, the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). Sometimes attributed to American-led efforts to destabilize the government of PNP Prime Minister Michael Manley, a dedicated socialist who had brought his country closer to Communist-led Cuba, the violence reached such heights that by the day of the general election a national state of emergency had been declared. Nonetheless, almost 85 percent of Jamaicans voted on December 15, 1976, and in South West St. Andrew—which the JLP had won in the past four elections—the turnout was nearly 97 percent. Simpson-Miller won 13,584 votes, more than three times the number cast for her JLP opponent, Joseph McPherson, giving the 31-year-old her first spot in Parliament, where she joined 46 other PNP members and 13 representatives of the JLP. In 1978 Simpson-Miller became a vice president of the PNP.
The next parliamentary elections were held on October 30, 1980 against a backdrop of high unemployment, governmental financial instability, and intense political violence that claimed the life of a minister of parliament and several hundred other Jamaicans. At some point during the campaign, Simpson-Miller’s office was attacked and people were killed around her. She later adopted a child who had lost her family to that year’s battles. Although no one side bore full responsibility for the violence, it tapered off after the JLP won control of the government, taking 51 seats to the PNP’s nine, one of which was Simpson-Miller’s. The results, however, were open to allegations of fraud. Simpson-Miller won 17,192 votes out of South West St. Andrew’s 20,992—a total that was more than 5 percent over the number of voters registered in the constituency, making it one of the nation’s two spots of seemingly indisputable overvoting. (The other was Southern St. Andrew, where a PNP member was also returned.)
The voting problems encountered, in 1980, perhaps made the PNP especially sensitive to the need for accurate electoral lists, so that in 1983, when the ruling conservatives called for early elections in mid-December, about a year before up-to-date records could be prepared, the PNP decided to boycott. No PNP members stood for parliament, Simpson-Miller included, and while about 86 percent of eligible Jamaicans had voted, in 1980, only 29 percent turned out, in 1983, giving the JLP complete control of the government. That same year the PNP appointed Simpson-Miller to be the party’s spokesperson on a variety of social issues, including women’s affairs, consumer’s affairs, pensions, and social security. Simpson-Miller maintained the position for the next six years, while the PNP was out of power—evidence, at least in part, of how well the position was suited to someone almost universally praised for her charisma and ability to talk and listen to Jamaicans from all walks of life. By 1987 the PNP was gaining momentum once again, having made significant gains in local elections the year before, and Simpson-Miller’s popularity had risen to the point that she was said to be making a behind-the-scenes bid for leadership of the PNP if Manley, sick with cancer, should be forced to leave his post as the party’s president. He remained in control, however, and prepared a strong campaign for the next elections, which were due at the end of 1988 but delayed because of the devastation the island suffered when Hurricane Gilbert struck, on September 12.
One significant ideological change in 1989 for the PNP and by extension Simpson-Miller was a retreat from the party’s previously clear commitment to socialist principles—a commitment once deep enough for a weekly magazine in the Soviet Union to feature a photo of Simpson-Miller “as the epitome of emancipation, shimmering in a fitted frock of yellow satin,” according to the Economist (February 12, 1983). Instead, the party emphasized the value of private enterprise and made other statements that suggested it would maintain the strong relations with Washington that had been established under the JLP leader Edward Seaga. The violence that had haunted the 1976 and 1980 elections returned in 1989, albeit less severely, with 10 people dying over the course of the three-week-long election campaign and 81 hurt. Still, the campaign was successful for the PNP and Simpson-Miller. The party won 75 percent of the country’s votes, giving it 45 of the Parliament’s 60 seats, while Simpson-Miller claimed an incredible 93 percent of the vote among her constituents. While turnout in South St. Andrew again went beyond 100 percent, the results in Simpson-Miller’s district of South West St. Andrew remained under, at 97.5 percent; even so, Simpson-Miller’s opponent was initially reported to have been interested in contesting the outcome.
With the PNP returned to office, Simpson-Miller was a clear choice for a ministerial position. According to a BBC Summary of World Broadcasts (February 21, 1989), Simpson-Miller sent “signals that she did not want to be shunted off into a typical women’s ministry,” with the result that she was named the country’s labor, welfare, and sports minister. Her responsibility for labor was considered especially important, and Simpson-Miller regarded it, to some degree, as something that would encourage other Jamaican women to get involved in politics. “The few women like me who are in the front line of politics will be forever lonely out there if more women do not develop the confidence to come forward,” Simpson-Miller told Suzanne Francis-Hinds for the Inter Press Service (March 15, 1989). She went on to say, “We really have to take on the task of bolstering others and closing ranks when there are attempts made to tear down women and belittle their efforts. We must become more aware what solidarity means. It means ‘if you touch one, you touch all.’”
In March 1992, a little more than three years after the national elections, the PNP underwent an internal electoral struggle, one that anticipated the battle Simpson-Miller faced in 2006. With Manley too sick to carry on as leader, Simpson-Miller waged a virtually full-scale campaign over two weeks against party leader P.J. (short for Percival Noel James) Patterson, who had a long career in the PNP and had served as Manley’s deputy prime minister for six years. A lawyer with an undergraduate degree in English, Patterson to many represented the Jamaican political establishment in the race, where Simpson-Miller was the scrappy woman-of-the-people, campaigning under the slogan, as the Latin America Regional Reports: Caribbean (May 14, 1992) reported, “Give the people what they want” and speaking in an English more clearly tied to Jamaican Creole than the London School of Economics-stamped speech of Patterson. The contrast set the stage for what David Adams in the London Independent (March 28, 1992) characterized as a contest between intellect and integrity. The dynamic of the election illustrated a problem Simpson-Miller has faced her entire political career. Although she is immensely popular among Jamaican voters, career politicians and other members of the Jamaican elite, even those in her own party, have quietly but persistently deprecated her leadership abilities and her intellect, throwing their support behind people who more closely resemble Jamaican leaders of the past—that is, highly educated professionals who also happen to be men. “There is class prejudice,” journalist John Maxwell told Dwight Bellanfante for the Kingston Sunday Observer (September 11, 2005). “People figure she is not of the right background, being of working class origins, and as a woman, though Jamaican men will not readily admit it, they are very sexist.” Simpson-Miller lost the fight, in 1992, by a substantial margin—756 votes to 2,322—but her position as Patterson’s most obvious successor was set, and her popularity among the majority of Jamaicans was undiminished. (A July 13, 1992 report by Laurie Gunst in the Nation suggested that one reason for the outcome was Simpson-Miller’s alleged connections to gang leaders. By choosing Patterson, the PNP delegates were hoping to avoid the electoral violence that might break out between her and the likely JLP rival, Seaga, whom the article also identifies as being closely connected to gangs. David Adams’s article also mentions Simpson-Miller’s alleged gang ties.)
In 1993 Patterson called elections early to take advantage of the PNP’s escalating popularity, and when the day came in late March, Simpson-Miller handily won South West St. Andrew for the fourth time, taking in 90.8 percent of the 18,104 votes cast. Relatively free of violence, the election nonetheless reached a pitch of drama when Seaga was accused by a large group of voters of removing a ballot box from a polling station in a district adjoining Simpson-Miller’s. The crowd broke up only when Simpson-Miller and a group of soldiers and police interceded. In the end, the PNP enjoyed a 52-seat victory in Parliament, and Patterson’s position as prime minister was cemented. With a newly configured Parliament, Simpson-Miller’s ministerial portfolio also changed. Her sports duties were dropped, while she maintained responsibility for labor and welfare. In 1995, however, another cabinet shuffle put Simpson-Miller back in charge of sports; she kept labor as well, while adding social security. She kept these responsibilities even after the December 17, 1997 national elections changed the composition of Parliament slightly, giving the JLP two additional seats but keeping the PNP in power for the third election in a row. In that same election Simpson-Miller won South West St. Andrew again, earning more than 48 times the number of votes of her JLP rival.
By the end of the 1990s Simpson-Miller was a unique force in Jamaican politics. A 1999 poll singled her out as by far the most popular person to succeed Patterson as prime minister, while her February 21, 2000 appointment as the minister of sports and tourism was greeted ecstatically by business leaders and even rival politicians, especially because of her responsibilities to the tourist industry. To understand the excitement, one has to realize that tourism is one of the country’s most important industries. Gordon “Butch” Stewart, who as of late 2004 owned nine major resorts on the island as well as significant holdings elsewhere in the Caribbean, called it “the best thing that could have happened to tourism,” a Latin American Regional Report for Intelligence Research (February 22, 2000) reported. Members of the JLP, generally happy to criticize the government on any grounds, “actually welcomed the appointment” and “offered encouragement,” Geof Brown reported for Jamaica’s Gleaner (February 26, 2000). The position also came with significant problems. Barely funded, the ministry had a hard time promoting the country’s image abroad—an image that was marred by the country’s reputation for violence. (In 2001, the year after Simpson-Miller was appointed, some 1,100 Jamaicans were murdered out of an estimated population of 2.5 million; by contrast, in the U.S. about 16,000 people are murdered out of a population of well over 285 million each year.) Even so, in April 2001 Simpson-Miller was able to tell a tourism industry conference in the Jamaican resort spot of Ocho Rios that a number of important statistics suggested that tourism was making surprisingly strong gains. Many of these were undercut later that year when the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the U.S. strongly hurt international tourism of all sorts.
Jamaicans went to the polls in October 2002 and though Simpson-Miller’s South West St. Andrew constituency was never in doubt—an October 2, 2002 summary in the Gleaner called it “the strongest PNP seat in Jamaica”—the PNP as a whole did lose a substantial number of spots, while still retaining control with 34 seats to the JLP’s 26. Under the new government, Simpson-Miller became the minister of local governments and sports. In addition to her routine work of celebrating the athletic successes of Jamaicans at home and in games around the world, the position also put Simpson-Miller in charge of how the national government dealt with smaller-level governments on such issues as the funding of fire companies. In April 2004 Simpson-Miller earned national acclaim when she abstained from voting against a JLP motion to express “grave concern” over the dramatic under-funding of the country’s fire services. Though the PNP-controlled Parliament routed the motion, Simpson-Miller’s abstention was taken as silent agreement and thus a sign of her integrity: she would not vote against her conscience for the sake of showing her loyalty to the party. Members of her party, however, considered it a betrayal, with fellow parliamentarians confronting her afterwards in loud voices and pointed fingers. “Although her decision may have earned her the status of pariah within the Party,” Garth A. Rattray wrote in the Gleaner (April 13, 2004), “it definitely earned her the admiration and respect of the people of Jamaica. Now they know for certain that at least one Member of Parliament is willing to stand against political tradition for the good of the nation.”
Despite her shaky popularity within the PNP, Simpson-Miller was still the person most Jamaicans saw as their next prime minister in the years leading up to the 2007 elections. Her political credentials were enhanced by having served several times as acting prime minister when Patterson left the country on official business, while her high-profile camaraderie with the country’s athletes, particularly around the time of the 2004 Olympic games, helped solidify her popular appeal. On September 11, 2005 Patterson announced that a special election within the PNP would have to be held to elect his successor, and on November 6, Simpson-Miller officially began her campaign. Her most important rival was Peter Phillips, the minister of national security, and like Patterson in 1992, a man whose education and class background made him a more natural leader for the PNP insiders who would be casting the votes.
After a strong and sweeping campaign, which extended even into Jamaican communities in the U.S., Simpson-Miller won the race in February 2006 with 1,775 votes to Phillips’s 1,538. “I knew I had the support of the majority of Jamaicans, little did I know the comrades would turn out so much today for Portia, it really is a good thing,” Simpson-Miller said afterwards, as Charles reported for the Miami Herald (February 26, 2006). “It is a promise of hope for every boy or girl in every home across . . . Jamaica to know that one day they too could rise to become the leader of one of the major political parties in Jamaica and prime minister.” Simpson-Miller’s success was celebrated by Jamaicans and by leaders around the world, because she had triumphed in the male-dominated world of Jamaican politics. “The groundswell of support for Simpson-Miller has cut across gender,” Jamaican newspaper columnist Jean Lowrie-Chin told Danna Harman for the Christian Science Monitor (March 13, 2006). “You hear as many men as women saying that ‘It’s woman time now—give her a chance.’” The director of Jamaica’s Bureau of Women’s Affairs, Faith Webster, told Harman, “Portia has gone crashing through that ceiling. It is yet to be seen how this will play out for women in general, but we are optimistic.”
Simpson-Miller was sworn in as prime minister on March 30, 2006. In her inaugural address, she told the audience, Howard Campbell reported for the Associated Press Worldstream (March 31, 2006), “The first pledge I make as prime minister is to advance human rights and individual liberties. Each individual is sacred and none is better than the other. I pledge to work tirelessly to end all corruption and extortion. Both of these diminish our economic potential and I will do everything in my power to break the power of the criminals.”
In her first months in office, Simpson-Miller worked to secure deals with Chile, Venezuela, the U.S., and the World Bank to ensure continued investment in Jamaica. She also initiated a $9.8 million job-creation plan and opened discussions with the JLP aimed at curbing violence in future elections. In early October 2006, however, JLP leader Bruce Golding accused Simpson-Miller’s party of accepting approximately $467,000 from the Dutch-based oil company Trafigura Beheer. Though the PNP described the funds as a contribution toward their recent party conference, the money was alleged to come from kickbacks related to a contract the current government had signed with Trafigura. The controversy led to the resignation of the information minister, Colin Campbell, and prompted Simpson-Miller to call for her party to return the funds. On October 17 Golding forced a no-confidence vote against the current administration. The PNP succeeded in dismissing the motion, but an official investigation of the matter is currently underway, led by the government’s contractor general, Greg Christie. Elections were expected to take place in early 2007, but some observers suspect that they might be postponed until outcry over the corruption scandal has died down.
Often described as a “serial kisser” for her willingness to dole out celebratory pecks to everyone she meets, Simpson-Miller lives in Kingston with her husband.
Suggested Reading: Electoral Office of Jamaica Web site; Jamaica Information Service Web site; (Kingston, Jamaica) Gleaner (on-line) Feb. 26, 2006; (Kingston, Jamaica) Sunday Observer (on-line) Sep. 11, 2005; (Union Institute and University) Network (on-line) Fall 2000
Citation:
Original source: Current Biography International Yearbook
Original publication date: 2006
Original publication type: Print
Publisher of original publication: The H. W. Wilson Company
Database publisher: The H.W. Wilson Company
Database: Biography Reference Bank
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Source: Current Biography International Yearbook, 01/01/2006
Accession Number: 202986524