Ogunseye released on $100,000 bail

Apr 04, 2023 Court Stories, Features / Columnists, News

Kaieteur News – Working People’s Alliance (WPA) Executive Member, Mutope Tacuma Ogunseye, was on Monday charged under the Racial Hostility Act, and placed on $100,000 bail.

Seventy-one-year-old Ogunseye of Section ‘C’ Turkeyen, Greater Georgetown, appeared at the Vigilance Magistrate’s Court before Senior Magistrate Fabayo Azore. Ogunseye was accompanied by his lawyer, Nigel Hughes.

Charged, WPA Executive Member Mutope Tacuma Ogunseye

Ogunseye pleaded not guilty to the charge which was read to him. He was charged with attempting to excite hostility or ill will on the grounds of race, Contrary to Section 2(3) of the Racial Hostility Act Chapter 23:01. Police Legal Advisor Mandel Moore is prosecuting the case. He made objection to bail being granted on the grounds of the seriousness of the offence, the penalty attached and that there is an ongoing investigation into the matter.

According to Hughes, he made a bail application for his client citing that they are other serious offences which carry life imprisonment but are also bailable offences at the magistrate’s court.

Prosecutor Moore laid over submissions to the court and on the next court date, the defence is expected to make their submissions. Senior Magistrate Azore granted bail and the matter was adjourned to April 6, 2023. For his part, Ogunseye told reporters outside of the court room that, “…I have walked this road many times before…the state really don’t have any case against me, I think they are clutching at straws…”

Kaieteur News reported that the WPA had said that it was convinced that it has touched a raw nerve in the country’s political economy which others have been whispering about—the country’s descent into autocracy and ethnocracy.

“We feel that if the drift is not arrested, our country will enter a state of permanent instability and disorder. WPA has watched with horror as the government has become drunk with the oil revenues which have come our way. Instead of using those revenues to combat poverty and ethnic division, the government through its policies has used them as tools of social and ethnic inequality,” the WPA said. The party said from routine discrimination in distribution of resources to extrajudicial killings to the criminalization of opposition members to the ruling party’s monopolisation of every inch of political space, the government has ruled with an iron fist.

“WPA feels that approach to governance is unsustainable in any society, particularly one with a history of ethnic contestation and division. It is with that in mind that the WPA took to the streets to dramatize its concerns. We want to alert the rulers and the country at large to the dangers ahead and to eventually cause a political reset. Towards that end, the party not only recounts the instances of social and ethnic sufferings, but boldly calls for mass resistance by the sufferers in the spirit of the Rodneyite principle of Self-Activity,” the party stated.

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Executive Member, Mutope Tacuma Ogunseye, Nigel Hughes, Vigilance Magistrates’ Court, Working People’s Alliance (WPA)

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