Vice President Dr Bharrat Jagdeo maintains that the utterances by city businessman and Natural Resources Fund (NRF) Investment Committee member, Dr Terrence Campbell about him was racist.
“I maintain my position that what Terrence Campbell wrote and what was circulated by Nigel Hughes and others was a racist statement,” Jagdeo said during his press conference on Thursday.
He was at the time referring to comments made by Campbell in a Letter to the Editor. Campbell said in the letter that the VP has a genetic predisposition to be duplicitous.
Campbell has since approached the ERC to lodge a complain, noting that Jagdeo misinterpreted his comment and is exciting racial hostility.
Dr Campbell told the ERC that Mr Jagdeo “wilfully” excited hostility and ill will against him in violation of the Racial Hostility Act (2002) Section 2 (1) and Section 18 (1) (e) of the Cybercrime Act (2018) by broadening the comment to include all Indo- Guyanese.
Jagdeo noted that the businessman could have simply referred to him instead of linking any behaviour to his ancestry.
“Terrence Campbell said I am genetically predisposed to duplicity or to lie. Terrence Campbell does not know my parents, he couldn’t be commenting on my father or my mother. My genes come from my parents and from my ancestry. So it’s a dog whistle. In fact, it’s more overt than that; If you don’t know my parents, you can only be commenting on my ancestry which is Indo-Guyanese ancestry and I maintained that it is a racist statement. He said I’m predisposed to act in a certain way because of my ancestry, he could have easily said ‘Jagdeo was duplicitous’” Jagdeo said on Thursday.
According to the Vice President, had he made such a comment about a person of African descent, “By now, everyone would be calling on me to apologise.”
Jagdeo said he hopes the ERC investigates the matter quickly and issues a formal report.
