When David Hinds meets Moses Nagamootoo

Jul 08, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

David and I were having lunch at Hot and Spicy Restaurant on Albert Street last week, and I reminded him what I wrote about Lincoln Lewis’ attitude to Moses Nagamootoo on the dropping of his (Lincoln’s) Sunday Chronicle column.
In a telephone conversation with Lincoln over the Chronicle fiasco, I asked Lincoln what he would tell Nagamootoo when he saw him. That question was asked in the context of Nagamootoo being the subject minister for the state media but unlike the leader of the AFC, Raphael Trotman and the President and also the Minister of the Presidency, Nagamootoo has not spoken even one word on the imbroglio.
Lincoln said he would not have even one word to say to Nagamootoo. He intoned; “I have nothing to say to him, I don’t want anything from them.” Those were his exact words.
So I put the same question to David. He exclaimed; “What! I will have plenty to say to Moses. You wait. It was he who invited me to write for the Chronicle!”
So when David Hinds meets Moses Nagamootoo the elephant and ant proverb will come into play. I guess two longstanding friends will part ways if they haven’t already.
If David Hinds can remember, I warned him about writing for the Chronicle. The advice came one Sunday evening at the studio of Channel 9. We were waiting to go on air. I only recently knew he had become a columnist for the Chronicle. I asked why he did that, and I predicted there would be problems. I know my country. I know my country’s politics. I know my country’s leadership. I know as a trained intellectual what power does to humans. I couldn’t understand why David accepted Nagamootoo’s offer. My prediction of trouble came true.
Here is why I felt there would have been problems with the column. It relates to power and betrayal.
Whatever faith I had in the APNU+AFC government was shattered days after the election results. The AFC bigwigs met at their head office and decided on Cabinet appointments. A woman who never campaigned for the AFC, raised a finger to help the AFC, was never seen around the AFC, was contacted by telephone in that room and offered the portfolio of Minister of the Environment. Three AFC powerhouses were adamant in giving her the job. Over the telephone, she turned it down.
For me, that was the limit of human abomination. It was depravity without limits. I was so angry because so many educated cadres who were in the trenches were overlooked for the middle class friend of the middle class leadership of the AFC, that I did a column on the repugnancy. Then General-Secretary of the AFC, David Patterson replied. I reproduce part of his response; “When the ministry of environment was proposed, we decided to go for a civil society placement, plus a woman. If your source is an honest person, he or she would at least admit that’s why that decision was made.”
I replied to David Patterson, telling him among many other things, the following; “no decent activist should accept a small group in a national party just randomly calling up a stranger and asking them if they want to be a minister. Really David, that is unheard of anywhere in the world”.
To this day, inner leaders of the AFC insist that they know of no such agreement to give a civil society member a ministry and they were not consulted on the choice for that ministry. This was the beginning of the power madness taking over the new government in May 2015.
When Imran Khan offered me column space in the Chronicle, I politely declined. I declined because I knew what would happen, and it happened to David Hinds and Lincoln Lewis.
After the AFC’s choice for Minister of the Environment, came the almost secret ministerial salary increase. Then that was followed by the extension of the barriers around Parliament that, in 2012, APNU and the AFC voted to remove. Today in 2018, the PPP’s idea of ringing the Parliament with barriers when the House is in session has been taken to morbidly excessive heights by APNU+AFC.
There was every indication since May 2015 that the APNU+AFC coalition would go in the direction of power-tripping. David Hinds as an activist since he was 18 years and now a competent scholar had to know that power intoxication was coming. He remained at the Chronicle doing what? Doing what scholars do – excoriate power abuse. Sadly for David Hinds, he became a victim of the very thing he exposed at the Chronicle.

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