My conversation with Amanza Walton-Desir in 2016

May 06, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – I don’t drink any kind of alcohol. I don’t smoke. I hate large crowds. So I was wandering around all by myself at Leonard Craig’s wedding in Region Five in 2016 and struck up a conversation with one of the world’s stunningly beautiful women.
She told me she is a lawyer working in the civil aviation sector. She said she and Craig knew each other well since they grew up in the same West Coast, Berbice village. With a quiet voice and a saccharine smile, she listened to the only conversation I can generate when I am talking to strangers – politics in Guyana.
If there is anything I can remember about our conversation, there are two things. One is I told her about corruption in the APNU+AFC government. The other is what I considered her disinterest in political life. I named a minister, which for obvious reasons I cannot state here. People on reading this, may ask Amanza Walton-Desir (AWD) who the minister was if she can remember.
That was a private conversation between us and if she remembers she should leave it undisclosed. I offered the minister’s identification to her because I was speaking on my disappointment with the May 2015 dispensation and I had evidence of the corruption. The other thing was that I got the distinct impression that she was not politically driven.
From that year unto this time, I never saw AWD again. But my eyes were opened widely when I read in the news that she had become a PNC Member of Parliament. Was that the woman I was talking with at Craig’s wedding reception? Now she has burst onto the national scene again; this time for her psychological analysis of Indian voters that was done without using the holistic methodology.
I have done four columns of her controversial statement of Indian voters being Pavlovian in their response to their leaders’ demagoguery. In all four columns, my point was that she chose not to deal with the pitfalls of race-driven instincts among the Guyanese people, but isolated Indians for a poor response to leadership chants. In all four columns, I belaboured the point that a Black politician in the leadership of a Black party cannot evaluate the weaknesses of the other major race grouping – East Indian – Guyanese because that person is in no moral authority to lecture the other half.
Maybe this is my final column (unless she shows egregious recalcitrance) on those methodological and sociological flaws of her interview. For the rest of this commentary, there are some questions I would be deeply grateful if AWD can expand with profound honesty and brave intellectualism
Question 1 – No government in the entire world, no legislator in any law-making institution in any country in the world, no major international organisation in the world has accepted that the result of the March 2020 election was flawed and thus the results cannot be accepted. Against this graphic reality do you accept your party’s decision that the PPP did not win a free and fair poll?
Q2 – If yes, do you believe that the accusation is logical that such people who accept the PNC’s distortion of reality in March 2020 are not energetic enough to think for themselves?
Q3 – This is related to question 2. Michael Carrington of the AFC’s leadership told me that he was dumbfounded at people of all ages including educated ones telling him that they believe and know the PPP tampered with the voting to make it win. I can distinctly remember him saying that these people seriously believed that happened. Would this not be a case of people not thinking logically about what takes place in their country but chose to parrot what their leaders told them?
Q4 – At the psychic level were you comforted with your integration into an ethnic party rather than seeking out a more multi-racial outfit and there were plenty to choose from in late 2019. The list includes ANUG, Citizens’ Initiative, Change Guyana, The New Movement, the Liberty and Justice Party. Really, madam why the PNC? Can you elaborate so Guyanese can have a more varied insight into how you think?
Q5 – Are you not unhappy and emotionally distressed at how your African dominated party, PNC, treated African Guyanese from May 2015? The examples are oceanic. Black youths were betrayed when the campaign promise on marijuana were discarded. No commission into the Buxton troubles. No upping of the retirement age for civil servants.
Q6 – Finally, as a young person not born in the 1970s, do you accept President Burnham ordered the assassination of Walter Rodney? Over to you AWD.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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