Matters connected to race are the trickiest subjects in the country, and ill-considered remarks, whatever their intention, often have a way of boomeranging back to strike the person who uttered them. The latest politician to discover this is APNU+AFC Parliamentarian Amanza Walton-Desir, who during an appearance on the talk-show ‘Politics 101’ described the PPP/C “base” as being “mentally lazy”.
Unsurprisingly this categorisation produced a torrent of criticism from any number of people, including the PPP/C and the Indian Action Committee, the last named of which has referred her to the Ethnic Relations Commission. They have maintained that her comments were racist in nature, being directed at the Indo-Guyanese community, and that in the context of the nation’s politics there was no ambiguity about this.
The APNU Parliamentarian was not in retraction mode, asserting in a video statement that “Their propaganda machinery has been put into overdrive to paint me as a racist,” and that their interpretation of her words was a deliberate misinterpretation of what she had said in an attempt to vilify her. Turning the tables, she accused the governing party and its “surrogates” of being “content to continue the ruinous racist rhetoric that has plagued Guyana since her independence … and continues to arrest her development.” She went on to say that “in their crazed frenzy to deliberately twist my words they have forced every Guyanese to ponder [whether] the PPP/C is suggesting that they consider only Indo-Guyanese to be their supporters.”
It is true Ms Walton-Desir did not say that ‘Indians’ or ‘Indian-Guyanese’ or ‘Indo-Guya-nese’ were “mentally lazy” when speaking on the talk-show. But she must be extraordinarily naïve if she thinks that by using the term ‘base’ instead, listeners will not believe she is resorting to a euphemism for the governing party’s Indian supporters. Writers and commentators routinely use the word as a substitute for the ethnic constituencies of both the major parties and this has been the practice for decades. That usage is founded on the simple fact that the core support for both APNU and the PPP has an overriding ethnic component.
There is plenty of material on the politics of this nation in the past which has alluded to the fact that Indians outnumber Africans. This left the PNC with little prospect of winning an election on its own, it was argued, unless it had recourse to fraud. And all elections between 1968 and 1985 were rigged. Since 1992 the political cognoscenti here had to do little more than look at the figures in the censuses to get some general idea of poll outcomes, and they hardly had need of the results of LAPOP surveys indicating that most Indians voted for the PPP and most Africans for the PNC, in one or another of its incarnations.
In addition, Ms Walton-Desir could hardly be surprised about how her remarks have been interpreted, considering the comments which preceded them. The PPP/C had a base, she said, “who prefer if they say this is going to happen – that these men are going to come and rape your daughters and kill your children − they believe that because the burden of sorting things out for themselves is too great … they remain trapped all the while believing they are free …” ‘These men’ can only be a reference to PNC male supporters and by inference she is talking about African supporters, and not those of any other race. Given her subsequent accusations about the “ruinous racial rhetoric” of the governing party and its “surrogates”, the presumption has to be that she is saying it is the Indian constituents of that party to whom this abusive racial talk is addressed.
That said, it may not be a matter of huge consequence as to whether she was directing her remarks to a specific ethnic group or not. The reality is that both Indian and African numbers have declined significantly over the decades, and while African numbers were never sufficiently robust for them to win an election on their own account, for many years an Indian voter base alone has been insufficient to propel the PPP into office either. The number of Africans voting for that party is small, while the numbers of Portuguese, Chinese and Europeans are so negligible as to make no difference to either side, no matter which way they cast their ballot.
Mixed race voters are far more numerically substantial, but what the figures and their regional dispositions suggest is that they lend the majority of their votes to the PNCR/APNU, which has helped that party to achieve 42% in past elections. For its part nowadays Freedom House needs the Indigenous vote to win a national poll. It must be observed that the Indigenous electorate is not unified, and some segments vote for the current opposition, so one cannot think why Ms Walton-Desir would want to indicate that those who don’t are not thinking for themselves. After all, the art of politics is that of persuasion not denigration, and one cannot believe that the resident of a hinterland village will be induced to change his or her vote after what they have heard the Parliamentarian say.
This is not to suggest that the PPP/C has not been guilty of employing racial rhetoric in a disreputable way in the past, and Vice-President Bharrat Jagdeo’s record in this regard stands out. Most of those who are condemning Ms Walton-Desir now did not condemn him then, and he had more than one instance of such speech to his credit. This in no way justifies what the Shadow Foreign Secretary said; it is a form of stereotyping one ethnic group, if not two, and can only exacerbate our fractured race relations, more especially directed as it is at the ordinary elector and not the political actor.
Some of her views such as her statements about PNCR supporters having a greater appreciation for the democratic process may be a consequence of a distorted vision of recent electoral events. They could too have been a reference to the period when the WPA disturbed the contours of Burnham’s days, but the vast majority of Guyanese were not born in that era. In an interview with this newspaper last December, the Parliamentarian responded in answer to a question about how a professional like herself would seemingly support the attempts to rig the last elections, that anyone who had that opinion was “wilfully deceiving themselves… 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.” For someone of her accomplishments this conveys the undoubted impression that ‘wilful deceit’ does not lie with the innumerable witnesses to the attempted fraud, both foreign and local, but closer to home.
While one would hope that racial tensions at the community level, caused as they frequently are by practical disputes, would be addressed by a given community without the interference of politicians, it has to be acknowledged that at the most fundamental level politics and the struggle for power are at the root of most of our problems related to race relations. Solving our political dilemma is not going to be done quickly, and if progress is to be made it will probably have to be tackled piecemeal. In the meantime, one wants some sort of equilibrium so that we can maintain the kind of environment necessary for a measure of meaningful discussion to take place on how we should proceed.
That environment will not be possible if politicians do not refrain from disparaging or offensive language. Many of them on both sides have been guilty of this over the years, not just the PPP as Ms Walton-Desir has claimed. However, at the present time the governing party has changed the nature of the political game since it seeks to woo away the PNC constituency with the various inducements which it presumes will be made possible by oil revenues. As it is, therefore, there is none of the Vice President’s infamous innuendos and offensive talk; instead we have President Irfaan Ali on May 5th trilling again about “unity”. However, he is still refusing to meet with the opposition, even when that is constitutionally required, thereby stymieing any hope of progress in terms of our political – and by extension ethnic − relations with each other.
What is particularly unacceptable in our current situation is Haji Roshan Khan’s response to Ms Walton-Desir’s comments, where on posts on his Facebook page he said that “Indo-Guyanese” should target her, and that she should be marked. It is one thing to refer someone to the ERC, but it is quite another in our unstable context to express oneself in a way that amounts to possible incitement to violence. She has rightly filed a criminal complaint against him.
And as for Ms Walton-Desir herself, if her grasp of politics is tenuous, her qualifications in the field of maritime law are impressive. The opposition needs someone who can help them develop ideas to place in the public arena in these hydrocarbon times, and who has the capacity to hold the government accountable in this field. What they do not need (and neither does the country) is any more racially insensitive or offensive utterances. In the end, the politicians need to talk to one another across the divide, not debase each other or their constituents. In addition, as a Shadow Foreign Affairs Minister, the acquisition of a little diplomatic speech by Ms Walton-Desir would not come amiss.
