DAVID Hinds shouted out on the Freddie Kissoon Show, last Wednesday, that he speaks for African Guyanese. David visits Guyana in June and July and in December each year. David has never spent four consecutive months in Guyana for the past decades.

But even if he was to live here, would African-Guyanese accept him based on what he says? Let’s go over to the AFC. For four years, Sherod Duncan has been ringing a bell on his show and cussing down the PPP/C government. While doing that, he held the position of General-Secretary for the AFC, while Nigel Hughes resigned since 2017 from the party.

Duncan ran for the leader position so did Hughes. Duncan attacked Hughes by saying that you cannot come around only at congress time; you have to be around and be participating. In fact, for each day Nigel appeared at the AFC, Duncan appeared 100 days. But look who AFC membership chose to lead the AFC and into the 2025 general election?

From my research, almost 80 per cent of the delegates were African-Guyanese. Black people chose Hughes over the loud-mouthed man that plays a cuss-down record every day. Should it not have been the other way around? After all, Duncan is in people’s faces every day yet Hughes beat him badly. The victory of Nigel Hughes has tremendous importance for political theory.

What is this importance? That street politics, bully boy tactics, cuss-down demagoguery are not indications of political popularity and political acceptance.

Hinds in his mind, thinks he speaks for African Guyanese. But the mind as we know thousands of years before Sigmund Freud was born can deceive you.

The eyes can deceive you too and this is where the optometrist comes in. In an exchange with Minister of Education, Priya Manickchand, the forever General-Secretary of the Trade Union Congress, Lincoln Lewis got personal and wrote: “When I look in the mirror, looking back at me is a big man in good shape. And I’d have liked to ask the minister to take a similar look in her mirror and turn to this nation and say why has mother nature been so cruel to her? I guess, the saying “lipstick on a pig; it is still a pig” may be most apt at this time.”
Are these the people that speak for African Guyanese? Do African Guyanese women appreciate their leaders speaking in such insulting terms about women? Of course, the obvious response by any human to what Lewis wrote is that he should consult his optometrist for the right pair of eye glasses.

Lewis like Hinds would insist that he speaks for African Guyanese. But do African Guyanese know about who or what these personalities are? Here is a brief introduction to African politics. Here are the words of Lewis for which he should have been arrested for racial incitement: “Immigration brings with it consequences such as stress on the education and health services, housing overrun, the creation of slums, and our resources exploited by others willing to undersell their labour. We also face a crisis of submerging our culture further. This threat comes from others who do not speak our language and share a common culture… we are facing a pending catastrophe which we must seek to avoid at all cost.”

Mr. Lewis was charged for the alleged assault of a woman half his size. Mr. Lewis runs an online anti-government news outlet named Village Voice and was taken to court for copyright infringement over Village Voice and lost. Then there is Mr. Tacuma Ogunseye. I wrote about Mr. Ogunseye’s activities in Buxton during the reign of the sadistic gunmen there. What I knew caused him to sue me for libel. I won the case because evidence cannot lie.

Ogunseye is before the courts for incitement and no one turned up at the police station or on the day of his court appearance. Mr. Kidackie Amsterdam is charged with a similar offence and not one African Guyanese was at the station or the court. But Amsterdam, like Ogunseye, Hinds and Lewis would say, they speak for Black people in this country. Next is Henry Jeffrey. He wrote that in every one of the 10 regions in Guyana in the general election of 2020, there was election tampering from 18 per cent to 55 per cent.

That election was held at a time when the President was a former army head; his deputy was a former army intelligence chief; the Minister of Citizenship was a former Police Commissioner; the presidential adviser was a former army chief and Roxanne Myers and Keith Lowenfield were in control. Do Black people listen to these individuals?

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.