DAVID Patterson consented to be interviewed on the Freddie Kissoon Show but submitted a requirement – he did not want to talk about the incident when the AFC met to select its Cabinet members in May 2015 and all the top AFC leaders agreed to offer the Environment Minister position to someone who was not even remotely connected to the AFC or even spent one minute campaigning for the AFC in 2011 or 2015.

I accepted his conditionality, and the incident was not discussed on the show. The same David Patterson is on the campaign trail (AFC behaving as if the “silly season” has started) and wants Guyanese to vote for him and his party. Why should the electorate vote for people who were in power and refuse to discuss their time in office?

Mr. David Granger’s silence is unacceptable but understandable – he is not asking for our votes to put him back in power. Granger is gone so he does not have to face questions. Clive Thomas evades discussion on his time in power and chooses to avoid mentioning his role from 2015 to 2020. Again, that is unacceptable but understandable. Thomas will not be taking part in electoral politics for the remainder of his life. He doesn’t want our votes.
Joe Harmon quietly works at his law firm on Hadfield Street (four blocks eastward from where I was born). Harmon doesn’t give interviews and seems to have relinquished his political career. But Patterson, Nigel Hughes, Vincent Adams, and Cathy Hughes want our votes.
I am suggesting to voters that they demand answers from these people who held political power from 2015 to 2020. They want power again and they must manifest political decency and obligation and answer our question or voters must shun them.
Patterson and Hughes must go public with an explanation as to why they wanted to give a complete stranger a Cabinet portfolio over serious, qualified second-tier AFC leaders who spent years in the trenches. I have received about a dozen enquiries about the identity of this lady. Her name should go into book on AFC politics whenever it is written but I have restrained myself in naming her.
Michael Carrington, Rajendra Bissesar, Leonard Craig and Trevor Williams were in the room when the phone call was made to the woman but have not named her on the Freddie Kissoon Show, no doubt because they, like me are afraid of libel. She is a member of the Mulatto/Creole class and has a close

family relation with fellow Mulatto/Creole personality, controversial businessman, Terrance Campbell.
Once more I am calling on Patterson and Hughes to level with the Guyanese people on why such an unusual choice not seen in normal politics was made. If they cannot answer, then they must offer an explanation why it cannot be done. I have asked Nigel before, and I am asking him again right now – who killed the amendment to the marijuana legislation that he drafted and was on the Order Paper in 2016?

I have a third question for Nigel. Immediately after a special AFC retreat in April in 2016, he resigned as chairman and from active politics and never made his reason public. Does he feel he has to be accountable to the voters and outline the factors that caused him to exit politics?
I have a question for Vincent Adams. A substantial figure in the hierarchy of the AFC did not want the AFC to concede defeat at the 2020 poll, and so frustrated at a likely PPP victory, declared at a virtual meeting of the AFC in July 2020 that Guyana should have racial partition. Vincent Adams was the only hierarchical leader to reject the partition proposal.

Yet Adams writes incessantly about lack of accountability in the PPP Government but he himself is not a person open to accountability. He has barefacedly refused to discuss this malignant and treasonable advocacy for partition yet he and the person that composed the partition position want our votes. I am suggesting to voters to shun Adams at the November poll unless he makes himself accountable on the partition suggestion.

Finally, voters and AFC members must furiously demand an answer from Cathy Hughes about the accusations made against her by Trevor Williams, a former foundation member of the AFC. Mr. Williams and Ms. Hughes sat next to each other in Parliament for five years and fifteen years as executive members of the AFC. Yet Ms. Hughes refused to give Mr. Williams the cell phone number of Volda Lawrence. That was an obnoxious act of Ms. Hughes. Barring any lie from Mr. Williams, she has to come clean with the electorate.
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.