Prime Ministers of Jamaica   

                   Sir Alexander Bustamante (JLP): 29 April 1962 to 23 February 1967

                   Sir Donald Sangster (JLP): 23 February to 11 April 1967

                   Hugh Shearer (JLP): 11 April 1967 to 2 March 1972

                   Michael Manley (PNP): 2 March 1972 to 1 November 1980

                   Edward Seaga (JLP): 1 November 1980 to 10 February 1989

                   Michael Manley (PNP): 10 February 1989 to 30 March 1992

                   P. J. Patterson (PNP): 30 March 1992 to 30 March 2006

                   Portia Simpson-Miller (PNP): 30 March 2006 to 11 September 2007

                   Bruce Golding (JLP): 11 September 2007 to present

Sir William Alexander Clarke Bustamante GBE, Order of National Hero, PC (February 24, 1884 - August 6, 1977) was a Jamaican politician and labour leader.

He was born William Alexander Clarke to an Irish Roman Catholic [1] planter and a mother of Taíno origins. He claimed that he took the name Bustamante to honour an Iberian sea captain who befriended him in his youth.

After travelling the world, including working as a policeman in Cuba and as a dietician in a New York City hospital, he returned to Jamaica in 1932 and became a leader of the struggle against colonial rule. He first brought himself to public attention as a writer of letters to the Daily Gleaner newspaper; in 1937 he became treasurer of the Jamaica Workers' Union which had been founded by labour activist Allan G.S. Coombs. During the 1938 labour rebellion he quickly became identified as the spokesman for striking workers, and first manifested the charisma that was to lead to a distinguished political career. Coombs' JWU became the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union (BITU) after the revolt, and Bustamante became known as "The Chief".

He was imprisoned for subversive activities in 1940. However, the anti-colonial effort resulted in the granting of universal suffrage to Jamaica. He was released from prison in 1942 and founded the Jamaican Labour Party, in 1943. His cousin, Norman Manley, founded the JLP's chief rival, the People's National Party. Bustamante's party won 22 of 32 seats in the first House of Representatives elected by universal suffrage, making Bustamante the unofficial government leader (as Minister for Communications) until the position of Chief Minister was created in 1953. He held this position until the JLP was defeated in 1955. In 1947 and 1948 he also served as mayor of Kingston.

Though initially a supporter, he came to be an opponent of the Federation of the West Indies and agitated for Jamaica to become an independent state. It was Bustamante's decision that the JLP would not contest a by-election to the federal parliament that resulted in his rival and cousin, Premier Norman Manley, calling the referendum in 1961 that led to Jamaica's withdrawal and the break-up of the Federation.

Jamaica was granted independence in 1962 and Bustamante served as the independent country's first Prime Minister until 1967. However, in 1965 he withdrew from active participation in public life, and real power was held by his deputy, Donald Sangster.

In 1969, Bustamante was proclaimed a 'National Hero of Jamaica', along with Norman Manley, the black liberationist Marcus Garvey and two leaders of the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion, Paul Bogle and George William Gordon.

His death occurred on the fifteenth anniversary of Jamaica's independence.

Sir Donald Burns Sangster (October 26, 1911 - April 11, 1967) was a Jamaican politician and Prime Minister of Jamaica. He entered politics in 1933 at the age of 21 with his election to a local parish council. In the Parish of St Elizabeth, Jamaica. In 1944 was elected to the House of Representatives of Jamaica as a member of the Jamaica Labour Party becoming Minister of Social Welfare and Labour and, later, Minister of Finance. He became Acting Prime Minister in February 1964 when Prime Minister Sir Alexander Bustamante became ill. He succeeded Bustamante as Prime Minister on February 23, 1967 only to die in office on April 11. His face appears on the Jamaican one hundred dollar banknote. He also has an airport in Jamaica named after him (Sir Donald Sangster International Airport (MKJS)

The Most Honourable Hugh Lawson Shearer, ON,OJ,PC,LLD (Hon), (May 18, 1923 – July 5, 2004) was the fourth Prime Minister of Jamaica, from 1967 to 1972.

Born in Martha Brae, Trelawny Parish, Jamaica, near the sugar and banana growing areas, Shearer attended St Simon's College after winning a parish scholarship to the school.

In 1941 he took a job on the staff of a weekly trade union newspaper, the Jamaican Worker. His first political promotion came in 1943, when Sir Alexander Bustamante (founder of the Jamaican Labour Party) took over editorship of the paper and took Shearer under his wing. Shearer continued to get promotion after promotion within the union and acquired a Government Trade Union scholarship in 1947.

He was appointed Island Supervisor of Bustamante's trade union, BITU, and shortly afterwards elected Vice President of the union.

Shearer was elected to the House of Representatives of Jamaica as member for Western Kingston in 1955, an office he retained for the next four years until he was defeated in the 1959 elections.

He was a member of the Senate from 1962 to 1967, at the same time filling the role of Jamaica's chief spokesman on foreign affairs as Deputy Chief of Mission at the United Nations. In 1967 he was elected as member for Southern Clarendon and, after the death of Sir Donald Sangster, appointed Prime Minister on April 11, 1967.

Thanks to his work with the Jamaican Worker earlier in his life, Shearer managed to stay on generally good terms with the Jamaican working class, and was generally well liked by the populace. However, he did cause an outcry of anger in October of 1968 when his government banned the historian, Walter Rodney from re-entering the country. On October 16 a series of riots, known as the Rodney Riots broke out, after peaceful protest by students from the University of the West Indies campus at Mona, was suppressed by police; rioting spreading throughout Kingston. Shearer stood by the ban claiming that Rodney was a danger to Jamaica, citing his socialist ties, trips to Cuba and the USSR, as well as his radical Black nationalism.

Shearer was generally uncomfortable with notions of pan-Africanism or militant black nationalism. He was also insecure about the stability of newly independent Jamaica in the late 1960s.

His term as Prime Minister was a prosperous one for Jamaica, with three new alumina refineries were built, along with three large tourist resorts. These six buildings formed the basis of Jamaica's mining and tourism industries, the two biggest earners for the country.

Shearer's term was also marked by a great upswing in secondary school enrollment after an intense education campaign on his part. Fifty new schools were constructed.

It was by pressure from Shearer that the Law of the Sea Authority chose Kingston to house its headquarters.

In the 1972 elections, the JLP was defeated and the People's National Party leader, Michael Manley, became Prime Minister. Between 1980 and 1989, during the prime ministership of Edward Seaga, who had succeeded him as leader of the JLP in 1974, Shearer was deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs.

He died at his home in Kingston on July 5, 2004, at the age of 81. The Most. Honorable Hugh Lawson Shearer was survived by his wife, the Most Hon. Dr. Denise Eldemire Shearer, sons Corey Alexander, Howard, and Lance,and daughters Hope, Hillary, Mischka Garel, and Heather.

Michael Norman Manley (December 10, 1924 – March 6, 1997) was the fourth Prime Minister of Jamaica (1972 – 1980, 1989 – 1992).

The second son of Jamaica's Premier Norman Manley and Jamaican artist Edna Manley, Michael Manley was a charismatic figure who became the leader of the Jamaican People's National Party a few months before his father's death in 1969.

The Most Honourable Edward Philip George Seaga ON (born May 28, 1930) was Prime Minister of Jamaica for the Jamaica Labour Party from 1980 to 1989. He served as leader of the opposition from 1974 to 1980 and again from 1989 until January 2005. His retirement from political life marked the end of Jamaica's founding generation in active politics; he was the last serving politician to have entered public life before independence.

Seaga was born in 1930 in Boston, Massachusetts to Jamaican parents of Lebanese and Scottish descent. His parents Erna and Phillip George later returned to Jamaica when Edward was only three months old, and baptised their son in Kingston's Anglican Parish Church on December 5, 1930. Young Seaga attended primary schools in Kingston and St. James, before continuing his secondary education at Wolmer's High School for Boys, in Kingston. He attended Harvard University, graduating in 1952.

He entered politics as a member of the appointed Legislative Council, the upper house of the pre-independence legislature, in 1959. He made his mark in one of his first speeches as a legislator on the theme of 'The Haves and Have Nots'. In the 1960s and 1970s he served as minister of development and welfare in the government of Sir Alexander Bustamante and as minister of finance under Hugh Shearer, gaining, according to the 1981 yearbook of Merit Students Encyclopedia, a reputation as a "financial wizard". He became leader of the JLP in 1974, after becoming Member of Parliament for Western Kingston in 1962.

During the 1960s, he was a music promoter and owned and operated the West Indies Records Limited (WIRL) label. He sold this concern to Byron Lee in 1968 to reduce distractions from his political career. Lee renamed this label Dynamic Sounds.

Initially seen as a man of the left when he began his political career, Seaga moved to the right when he took over the JLP from Hugh Shearer in 1974 in a sustained attempt to wrest political power from the rival People's National Party led by Michael Manley. In this regard Seaga was accused by opponents of helping to foment a culture of political terror that bordered on civil war in the 1970s. By early 1978 the long and bloody campaign leading to the October 1980 election was renewed in earnest. It was at this time that Seaga made it clear in both Washington and Kingston that he would align Jamaica with the United States, break diplomatic relations with Cuba (which the Manley administration had actively promoted), and abolish the levy that Manley had placed on bauxite, which had angered the mainly US bauxite companies. It was at this time, too, that he spoke often about Jamaica needing "a military solution." The tenor of his speeches and activities in the United States led to his being censured by the Jamaican parliament in 1979.

Seaga and the JLP won the 1980 election by an overwhelming majority - 57 percent of the popular vote and 51 of the 60 seats in the House of Representatives. He was subsequently one of the first foreign heads of government to visit newly elected US president Ronald Reagan early the next year. With John Michael Geoffrey Manningham Adams, (also called Tom Adams) of Barbados, Seaga was one of the architects of the Caribbean Basin Initiative sponsored by Reagan. He delayed his promise to cut diplomatic relations with Cuba until a year later when he accused the Cuban government of giving asylum to Jamaican criminals.

Seaga supported the collapse of the Marxist regime in Grenada and the subsequent US-led invasion of that island in October 1983. On the back of the Grenada invasion, Seaga called snap elections at the end of 1983, which Manley's PNP boycotted. His party thus controlled all seats in parliament. In an unusual move, because the Jamaican constitution required that there be an opposition in the appointed Senate, Seaga appointed eight independent senators to form an official opposition.

Seaga lost much of his US support when he was unable to deliver on his early promises of removing the bauxite levy, and his domestic support also plummeted. Articles attacking Seaga appeared in the US media and a foreign investors left the country. Rioting in 1987 and 1988, the continued high popularity of Michael Manley, and complaints of governmental incompetence in the wake of the devastation of the island by Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, also contributed to his defeat in the 1989 elections.

Seaga remained leader of the Jamaica Labour Party until January 2005. He made several attempts to regain the Prime Ministership, running unsuccessfully against Manley's successor P.J. Patterson in three more elections. After an overwhelming defeat in the 1993 election and a meagre improvement in the 1997 election, he came close to winning the 2002 election, but stepped down as party chief in 2005 at the age of 74, to take up an academic post as a Senior Research Fellow at the University of the West Indies in Mona. His replacement as JLP leader was Bruce Golding.

From 1965 to 1996, Seaga was married to the former Marie ("Mitsy") Constantine, who held the title of Miss Jamaica 1964. The couple raised three children together, Anabella, Andrew and Christoper and divorced after thirty years of marriage due to irreconcilable differences. In 1997, Seaga married Carla Vendryes, thirty years his junior; she gave birth to their daughter, Gabrielle, in 2002, making him a father for the fourth time, at the age of 72.

Percival Noel James Patterson, ON, QC (born 10 April 1935) was the Prime Minister of Jamaica from 1992 to 2006. Until February 2006 he was the leader of the Jamaican People's National Party. The new PNP leader, Portia Simpson-Miller, took over as Prime Minister on 30 March 2006.

Patterson was Jamaica's longest-serving Prime Minister. He first entered politics in 1969, winning a by-election to a seat in western Jamaica, campaigning with the slogan "Young, gifted, and black".

Patterson served in a variety of cabinet posts under Prime Minister Michael Manley, both in the 1970s, and during Manley's second prime ministership at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s. He became Prime Minister and leader of the People's National Party himself when Manley resigned in 1992. Prior to the resignation Patterson was tied to a controversial scandal but miraculously led the party to victory in the three successive elections, an unprecedented record in Jamaican electoral history.

He made headlines in 2004 when it was announced that Jamaica (as well as Saint Kitts and Nevis and Venezuela) would not recognize the internationally-installed government of Gérard Latortue in Haiti following the U.S. Marine invasion that removed the democratically electedJean-Bertrand Aristide from office. Patterson was instrumental in arranging for Aristide to take up temporary residence in Jamaica during Aristide's lawsuit against the United States and France accusing the countries of kidnapping him.

Following Hurricane Katrina Patterson offered 30 trips for two, all expenses paid, to Jamaica for victims of the hurricane.

Patterson is a graduate of the University of the West Indies Mona Campus, and the London School of Economics.

Upon becoming the Prime Minister of Jamaica in 1992 Patterson was invested with the Order of the Nation allowing him to be known as "The Most Honourable" and to use the post-nominal letters "O.N."

In 2006 he was invested with the Order of Excellence of Guyana [1] allowing him to use the postnominal letters "O.E." [2]

Patterson is a Member of the Global Leadership Foundation, an organization which works to promote good governance around the world.^[1]

Portia Lucretia Simpson-Miller, ON, MP (born 12 December 1945 in Wood Hall, St. Catherine Parish) is Jamaica's Leader of the Opposition and was the country's Prime Minister from 30 March 2006 to 11 September 2007.

Orette Bruce Golding MP (born 5 December 1947) is Prime Minister of Jamaica and leader of the Jamaica Labour Party. Golding became prime minister following his party's slim victory in the 2007 Jamaican general election held on September 3 and former Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller's concession of defeat two days later. He was sworn in by the Governor-General of Jamaica on September 11, 2007. Golding is the nation's eighth prime minister since independence.^[1]

Golding was the founder of the National Democratic Movement (NDM). He was formerly the chairman of the Jamaican Labour Party (JLP) before he and others felt the need to split and form the new NDM in 1995. In 2002, he rejoined the JLP and in November 2003 was again elected chairman of the Party.

He was elected leader of the JLP, and also the leader of the opposition, on February 20, 2005, succeeding former leader Edward Seaga. Golding is a second-generation member of the JLP. His father, Tacius Golding, served as a member of parliament, and Speaker of the House of Representatives in the 1960s.

He is married to Lorna Golding and has three children, Sherene, Steven, and Ann-Merita.

Bruce Golding is the current M.P of West Kingston, and he hosts a monthly talk show called 'Jamaica House Live