IF you are White and you promote Rhythm and Blues, Soul, Reggae and Jazz, then you are familiar with the ideas, culture, philosophy, etc of Black people. It is almost impossible to promote Black music without having a close relationship with Black people.
There was a famous White Canadian jazz DJ who didn’t know the mike was still on. So a friend called him to have lunch. This was at a time when Caribana Carnival was on the streets in downtown Toronto. He responded by asking the guy if he was crazy to go out with all those (N word used) out there. He was immediately fired.

What he hid in his Freudian mind eventually came out. He had a condescending, contemptuous opinion of Black people. This is the identical situation with Cathy Hughes, except substitute class for race. In Ms Hughes’s case, the incident with Trevor Williams brought out the Freudian underpinnings of Ms. Hughes’s mind.

Mr Williams publicly said that then Minister Catherine Hughes refused to give him the cell number of then Minister Volda Lawrence when in his capacity as a high government official in charge of the Leonora Athletic Centre and the D’urban Park project, he requested to speak to Ms Lawrence on a concession from his office that Minister Lawrence wanted.

I have dealt with this incredibly negative attitude by Ms Hughes in a previous column (Friday, August 9, 2024, “The revelation about Cathy Hughes of the AFC”) but I want to repeat it and link it with her responses to the defence attorney, Sanjeev Datadin, in her libel writ against Mr. Bharat Jagdeo over being described as a “low life” by Mr Jagdeo.

The attitude of not giving out the cell number is quite common in the world. The determinant is who is asking. Mr Williams was one of the foundation members of the AFC and represented the AFC in Parliament and sat in the war room or the engineer’s room of the AFC for more than 10 years. He would have been a closely knitted colleague of Ms Hughes.

By what logic, given his position in the hierarchy of the AFC, could Ms Hughes have refused such a simple request from a fellow AFC colleague? In the previous column, my answer was the class perspective of Ms Hughes. I think she did not consider someone like Williams part of the Mulatto/Creole stratum of the AFC to be treated as an equal.

Before we move on, it is my undying belief that Ms Hughes showed Williams this attitude because of class elitism. When Williams told me about the cellphone incident, I thought I would never want to see or speak to Ms Hughes again. For me, the Williams incident is unforgivable. You do not behave like that in Guyanese politics.

Incidentally, when I wrote on the phone imbroglio, Leonard Craig, a former high-ranking AFC leader, told me he once asked Raphael Trotman for the cell number of Robert Corbin. He said Trotman used all kinds of excuses but in the end did not give him the number. Both Hughes and Trotman will ask Guyanese to vote for them in the next general election. Here is more of Hughes.

Under cross examination in the libel case last Monday, Ms Hughes was asked why the APNU+AFC did not call the election three months after the passage of the no-confidence vote (NCV) in November 2018. Here is the output from Ms Hughes that disqualifies her from being part of the political future of this country. She said she could not speak for the government at the time. But the very government that she was part of took a public position as to why it could not call the election three months after.

Three of those positions were the official imprimatur of the government, of which Hughes was a senior Cabinet member of party independent of Mr Granger’s party, because the government was a coalition formation. The three pathways used for refusing to call the April 2019 election after the NCV were –

1- 33 was not a majority of 65 but 34 was. 2- Charrandass Persaud’s vote was null and void because, as a Canadian, he should not have been a Guyanese parliamentarian. 3- GECOM was in no position to hold an election three months after December 2018.

Is Ms Hughes telling us she did not know her own party’s position as to why there could not have been an April 2019 election? Finally, Ms Hughes told the court that such a question should be put to the then President, David Granger. So only Mr Granger knows why the election was not called in 2019. Ms Hughes needs to leave politics ASAP.