Dear Editor,
I refer to a letter captioned, `Questions for Mr Heath-Retemyer’ that was published in the Sunday Stabroek on September 08, 2019 and authored by one Mr Eddy Layne, the Editor-in-Chief of MTV News Update. In his letter Mr. Layne sought to imply improper conduct on the part of Mr. Aubrey Heath-Retemyer, the Deputy Director of SARA, as a result of Heath-Retemyer’s participation in a meeting on August 29, 2019, at Critchlow Labour College, with the Minister of Citizenship, Winston Felix and a number of persons of the extended CARICOM family who are Africans of Haitian origin.
In his letter, Layne gleefully raised a number of questions which he demanded that Heath-Retemyer and Winston Felix respond to. It is my contention that MTV and its Editor-in-Chief are willing participants in the Jagdeo/PPP’s campaign that the government is engaged in plans to rig elections when they are held.
On Sunday evening (September 8, 2019) on the WPA Walter Rodney Groundings TV show on CH9, I addressed this erroneous and racist accusation that the meeting at Critchlow was part of an ongoing scheme by the APNU+AFC administration to use Haitians as voters in the upcoming elections to facilitate rigging. I argued that this accusation was the work of Jagdeo. I will now add that the hype around an innocent humanitarian meeting is part of the PPP/C’s “dirty tricks committee’s” concerted political propaganda plan to enhance that party’s post-election claims that the elections were rigged and resulted in their defeat at the polls.
On the programme, I also defended Brother Retemyer’s right as an African Cultural Activist and a Pan Africanist to extend solidarity to fellow Africans, Haitians or from the Mother Land, without having to justify his actions. These solidarity activities fall in the area of citizens’ personal rights. And equally important are in keeping with the United Nations’ Declared Decade for Africans.
I knew Retemyer years before he and I became employees at SARA. We met initially at the home of a mutual friend who is an African activist. She introduced him to me as a brother who lives in the USA and is actively engaged in working in the African Community in America, doing social and cultural work and heads an African organization.
Given this history and the fact that since his return to Guyana he continues these activities unabated, his ongoing interest in the plight of Africans compelled him to come to the aid of his Haitian brothers and sisters. It is nothing but political wickedness on the part of PPP/C, Layne and Heath-Retemyer’s other detractors to suggest, without an iota of evidence, that the meeting with Haitians was anything other than what he explained.
In closing, I pose the following question to the PPP/C, Layne and others: Why should Africans be called on to explain solidarity activities when persons of other ethnicities are allowed to do so uninhibited by the need to explain their actions to others?
Yours faithfully,
Tacuma Ogunseye
