When Amanza Walton-Desir decided to enter the world of Guyanese politics, she said she took a calculated risk.
And while she believes she was fired from a position she had held for over six years due to the change in government, she does not regret her choice.
The first time parliamentarian said the decision to become a candidate for the APNU+AFC alliance was one she took after much thought and discussions with her family, so it is one she intends to stick with.
Walton-Desir, who has over 15 years of experience in the practice of law, international law, public policy and administration and legislative drafting, held the position of General Counsel at the Guyana Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA) from 2013 to August of this year. She was fired soon after the PPP/C came into power and has since challenged that dismissal in the courts.
Prior to that, the mother of two, who has a Master’s in International Maritime Law, held the position of legal consultant/adviser to the Ministry of Public Works from 2010 to 2013 and during that time she provided legal and policy advice to the Minister of Public Infrastructure, the GCAA, the Maritime Administration Depart-ment and the Cheddi Jagan International Airport Cor-poration. From 2005-2010, she had the designation of special assistant to the Prime Minister, Ministry of Public Works and Communications.
“No, I can’t say I do at all,” Walton-Desir said when asked if she regretted the decision to enter politics. She however acknow-ledged that it has been challenging.
“But the fact that it is challenging is what will make it all the more rewarding,” she told Sun-day Stabroek in a recent interview in which she spoke about her dismissal, her motivation for entering politics and how she believes the whole issue of race in Guyana can be addressed.
“It was not a decision that I took lightly, it is a decision that I made after a lot of prayer and soul searching and after consultation with my family, after consultation with my mom who has now passed (her mother died last August). For me I am not known, and the people who know me know that I don’t half attempt anything and so you have to be very sure that this is what you want to do,” she said.
Ensuring that it is something you are certain about will come in handy, Walton-Desir said, as there will be moments when you have to pick yourself up by the bootstraps, find within yourself the ability to restart whenever you flounder and keep yourself motivated.
In a reflective mode, the new parliamentarian said she has to now acknowledge that politics was probably always in her blood when one considers her parents’ – Ovid Walton and the late Joy Walton – involvement along with her aunts and uncles. “I think fundamentally it is in the blood, I didn’t acknowledge it…,” she said.
Because she spent some of her formative years in Linden, Walton-Desir said, she was initially asked to be a councillor on the Regional Democratic Council in an effort to take some of her experience in infrastructure, maritime and aviation matters to the table. It was her intention to give back to a community that was good to her and her family that she decided to take up the offer, but a few weeks later she received a call and was asked to consider serving at a different level. “So that is how the conversation started and fast forward to where we are today,” she said, explaining her plunge into the world of politics.
“The nature of politics in Guyana as such, it is unfortunate that …we do not foster a culture where we can disagree without being disagreeable. The political culture is one where we believe that if I disagree with you then I am your enemy and that is not how I believe politics in Guyana should be,” she said.
For her, fundamentally, people could be on opposite sides of the political aisle and agree that they all love Guyana and want to see it go in a particular direction but simply differ on the way to get it there.
In her maiden budget speech in the National Assembly, Walton-Desir referenced her dismissal after serving for many years and she linked it directly to her entering the political arena.
This resulted in Minister of Public Works Juan Edghill making a public statement immediately after Walton-Desir’s presentation in which he accused her of a less than stellar performance. According to him, apart from her only seeming interest in increasing her emoluments she was also tardy in her performance of her duties, such as not submitting reports after representing the authority on overseas trips. He also accused her of abandoning her position during the five-month post-elections period that saw contentions over the results and of daily being present at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre where the recount of ballots took place.
Asked about this, Walton-Desir noted that the matter is now sub judice as she is challenging her dismissal. But referring to what has already been said in public, she said her performance at the authority speaks for itself.
“If any person wants to have a honest review of what it is that I was able to accomplish whilst at the GCAA I reservedly say without fear of successful contradiction that it was the efforts spearheaded by myself and really supported by the hard working staff of the GCAA…that [saw] Guyana receiving a twenty percent increase in its compliance with the ICAO [International Civil Aviation Organisation] framework,” she responded.
And as to her claimed abandonment of her position, Walton-Desir described it as a complete falsehood and stated that she never set foot in the conference centre and only once made it to the vicinity when she visited some of her political colleagues at the Aquatic Centre, located opposite.
Further, she pointed out that during that very period COVID-19 restrictions in government offices were implemented by the Ministry of Public Service and employees were required to work from home. She worked remotely; there is communication by email that would show this, and records of meetings held by virtual platforms.
“So that is a complete falsity,” she reiterated, while adding that every allegation the minister put forward she has addressed in writing and those letters are in her personnel file.
“So it is unfortunate that in seeking to besmirch me, the minister did not request, or he was not given the entirety of the story,” she stressed. “The years, they were rewarding I would say, they were challenging but they were rewarding… there are some hard working men and women in the civil aviation authority [and] many of them have dedicated their lives to aviation in Guyana and I can only hope that their inputs are recognised and they are given the requisite space to grow and to thrive,” Walton-Desir said of her employ at the GCAA.
But she said at the time of her departure she was at the top of her game at the authority and it was about moving on to the next challenge, which now appears to be politics. “So in the grand scheme of things, I suppose everything really does work in the way it should. You would have exited on your own terms, but you know the universe has a way of ordering things so that we move when we are required to,” she added.
‘Willfully deceiving themselves’
Told that some may question how a professional like herself would seemingly support the attempts to rig the recent elections, which the APNU+AFC has been accused of doing with the help of pliant elections officials, Walton-Desir said that anyone who has that opinion “is willfully deceiving themselves…and engaged in healthy self-deception. Because the evidence of rigging, the evidence of malfeasance… has been laid bare. The incontrovertible fact is that… [with] regard to the valid votes, the winner is clear,” she said.
For her it is ironic that there is the now championing by Donald Trump of only valid votes in the US following the recent polls there. According to her, if the country was not so politically divided and so entrenched in ethnic division, the hypocrisy of it all would be seen and acknowledged.
Following the March 2 elections then president David Granger and opposition leader Bharrat Jagdeo had agreed to a recount overseen by a team of Caricom election observers.
After the recount, the team in its report said that recount of votes from the March 2 general elections reflects the will of the people and provides a basis for the declaration of a result.
“Overall, while we acknowledge that there were some defects in the recount of the March 02, 2020 votes cast for the General and Regional elections in Guyana, the Team did not witness anything which would render the recount and by extension the casting of the ballot on March 02, so grievously deficient procedurally or technically, (despite some irregularities), or sufficiently deficient to have thwarted the will of the people and consequently preventing the election results and its declaration by GECOM from reflecting the will of the voters. The actual count of the vote was indeed transparent,” the team’s report said.
This was in stark contrast to Chief Election Officer Keith Lowenfield’s report to GECOM that the recount results were not credible. Lowenfield and others are now before the court accused of elections fraud.
The young politician believes that if Guyana is to achieve its fullest potential then race relations will have to be dealt with.
“It is unfortunate that that seed of discord that was sowed way back in colonial time continues to bear fruit up to today,” she said.
As to how Guyana could address this issue, Walton-Desir suggested that a useful starting point would be the truth and reconciliation commission example set by South Africa as that country addressed the apartheid system.
She said also that the local Ethnic Relations Commission does not have the capacity nor moral authority to do anything on race relations when it still has someone sitting as a commissioner who has “uttered manifestly racist and derogatory statements against one segment of the society.
But there has to be truth and then reconciliation. The problem of race has to be gutted wide open. The anguish of both sides has to heard, has to be acknowledged before we can move on. Attempting to paste a plaster over this is not going to work. The problem has to be gutted open and then we have to heal it,” she posited.
Law
Talking about her journey to today, Walton-Desir said she spent the first ten years of her life at Number 50 Village, Corentyne before her family moved to Linden where her father was appointed Town Clerk in the municipality.
Her entry into the legal profession was no surprise as since she was a child the only career she was interested in was law. She actually taught for a year after leaving high school, but she realized that she did not have the patience required for that profession even though she came from a family of teachers. Her late mother was a teacher and was the principal at various schools for over 20 years.
After she graduated from the Hugh Wooding Law School, Walton-Desir worked at the Legal Aid Clinic for one year and there she realized that practice was not for her.
“Because I found… that the system was very slow and frustrating… The sloth of the system frustrated me,” she explained.
In 2005, the opportunity presented itself for her to work in the office of then prime minister Samuel Hinds and she had been working in government ever since.
“I came of age as a professional under the PPP/C as most people my age would have because they were in government for 23 years. So I have very good relationships with a lot of members of the current government, but they know enough to know that I can call a spade a spade. I have always had the ability to respectfully disagree,” she said.
As to her future plans, Walton-Desir said her current focus is being a mother to her sons and serving her constituency to the best of her ability.
“There is a lot to do particularly given the dispensation that we are in right now where it seems as though the constitutional rights of our citizens are disregarded with impunity so there is always work to do,” she said.
She believes she is on the right path and the way she has been embraced reassures her that she made the right decision.
Apart from graduating from the International Maritime Law Institute in Malta where her dissertation won the best prize, Walton-Desir also has a Post Graduate Certificate in Legislative Drafting from the University of Guyana among other certificates from local and international insitutions.
