Amanza Walton Desir versus Sherwood Lowe

Sep 28, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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I came home from walking with my dog and saw my wife flicking the TV channels, so I asked her to continue so I could see if there were matches in the English Premier League. I wanted to know if Ronaldo was playing.
So I stumbled on a programme featuring the usual suspect, David Hinds. He had with him Aubrey Norton and Amanza Walton-Desir (AWD). This lady is barefaced. I would hope by now African-Guyanese have seen through AWD. She was fulminating against the government urging people to denounce “this installed regime.”I must have done six columns (please Google them using her name) on AWD proving the complete invalidity in her pronouncement that Indians cannot think for themselves, they are a mentally lazy people so they swallow the things the PPP told them and is telling them.
There is some understanding if an academic had made that adumbration. Academics will go in iconoclastic directions and at the end of the day, you throw up your hand in despair and yell out, “he has to prove that theory.” This is what academics do and they have to prove their revisionist interpretations.
The “mentally lazy” pronouncement of AWD became egregious because she belongs to a predominantly ethnic organisation and represents that party in parliament. That party, along with its rival on the other side of the ethnic fence – the PPP – has been trying for the past 70 years to capture the imagination of their supporters and they both sermonise them with their own theories.
It is simply a moral wrong to accuse the leadership of one of those ethnic outfits that they are fooling their constituents when you are doing the same. This is the cul-de-sac AWD ended up in and for some strange reason, there wasn’t an investigation by the Ethnic Relations Commission (ERC) into her misdeed even though when I first exposed AWD, I received an email from the head of the media monitoring unit asking for the tape. His name is Remington Eastman and here is what he wrote to me: “The program will be analyzed in its entirety, and if found to be in breach of any of the statutory laws governing the peddling of racism in the country, a wider investigation into the matter will be done by the ERC. Rest assured that the findings of any investigation and the action(s) taken by the ERC on issues brought before the Commission are always made public and are a matter of public record. This issue will follow the same guidelines and be given due process.”
I never heard back from the gentleman. AWD did the great escape. But this is Guyana.  AWD has not stopped her approach to African Guyanese. She said on the programme that the government was installed. That is not true. That cannot be proven. People voted out the APNU+AFC in an election that no country’s leadership in the entire world, no country’s lawmaker, not even one, on the globe and no recognised international organisation has even hinted that the election results was questionable.
Hakeem Jeffries, the Black congressman, who was seen in a photograph with AWD at the New York rally of the PNC diaspora rally, has not helped her party’s crusade. He has issued no statement rejecting the results of the elections. Why is AWD telling Black people in this country that the current administration was installed?  I am saying with pellucid enormity that is fooling people.
Contrast the demagoguery of AWD with the observance of Sherwod Lowe. Mr. Lowe’s PNC credentials need no expounding on. He was a PNC parliamentarian. His political loyalties are to the PNC and they are conspicuously contained in his letter to the newspaper the past 20 years. I worked as a fellow academic with Mr. Lowe at UG and I would classify his politics as African-driven and pro-PNC.
I am reproducing what Mr. Lowe penned in a recent letter: “The coalition must confront the reality that a majority of its supporters have accepted, at various stages since March 2020 that it lost the last election properly. Should the coalition leaders therefore admit electoral defeat, expect no great drama and trauma among party supporters. The claims of “cheated not defeated” have long worn thin. Most supporters now see it as only political posturing rather than a sincere assertion.”
Why has Mr. Lowe gone in this direction? Because he probably told himself that he is not a party leader and he is not prepared to fool people that support the party that he supports too. African-Guyanese are not mentally lazy. They must choose the intellectual mind of Lowe over the conspiratorial instinct of 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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