LETTER | Keep Wehner out of your hypocrisy: by D. Gisele Isaac

By D.Gisele Isaac

The hypocrisy is too much to bear now.  Listening to the critics of the United Progressive Party (UPP) up to Sunday, during The Big Issues, I was forced to ask myself whether the national situation will ever be better, when some folks are so quick to strain at a gnat while they swallow a camel.

It appears that the biggest thing coming out of the St. Peter by-election last Tuesday is candidate George Wehner’s soldierly stand as the ballots were counted.  To hear some tell it, his party sent him on a solo flight over enemy territory and then shut down all communication with the cockpit.  What a crock!

Retired from army duty though he is, George Wehner remains a declared soldier, a military and militant personality.  He went into the by-election a soldier and he came out of it in the same fashion.  In every outing, in every interview, Wehner referred to his training, his thought processes, and his operations in military terms – including how he would behave on a “sniper mission” or in an “ambush” situation.

Those terms elicited great offense in some quarters, as the critics deliberately took them out of context.  I heard the implications and the insinuations, and I was reminded of the incident, some years ago, when the Browne Administration, with the complicity of the Police brass, attempted to paint him as armed and dangerous, a weapons expert on the loose.    

The persecution and prosecution arose out of a months-old advertisement for his radio programme, “In the Trenches,” which – as he explained on the Nation’s Station – was merely political satire, a theme in keeping with his military background.  However, despite the promotion having aired – and threatened no one – in months, the political directorate decided to make it into what it was never was; and no less a person than the then police commissioner agreed to issue a “warning bulletin,” alerting the citizenry to the danger he supposedly posed, and calling on Wehner to surrender.

It was a farce.  And if the intention had not been to have him shot on sight by some citizen allegedly defending himself, I might have laughed.  But all discerning people realized that a target was being painted on the soldier’s back.  Where was the outrage of these critics, then, when a manhunt was launched for this person who had done no wrong?  Who, other than his UPP brethren, kept vigil outside Police Headquarters after he voluntarily “turned himself in” – though he was no common criminal – and was put in a mosquito-infested cell on the compound?

Only a seriously malicious person – or a fool – would believe that Wehner, all by himself, waged a brilliant, disturbing, and effective campaign in 21 days to capture virtually as many votes as the party’s last general-election foray into St. Peter.  Only a willingly deluded person would believe that, because the soldier elected to “stand and be counted,” he had been abandoned.  Only a volunteer blind and deaf smaddy would say they did not see and hear his colleagues – from the former prime minister and the former political leader to the current leader and deputy – on the hustings.  Not to mention his colleague candidates and caretakers, seasoned and new.

I know some media outlets set out to photo-propagandize, but those on the ground saw and recognized supporters from the party’s 16 branches at the meetings and during the canvassing.  And I also know they recognized that the team of white-clad workers on by-election day and night were, in fact, members and executives of the UPP.

So why the hypocrisy now? Why, now, the fake sympathy?  Why, at this time, the insincere plaudits and commendations from folks who did not, at any other time, wish Wehner well?

What Wehner did was historic.  No other candidate, for any party, at any time, had done it. You know what else was historic in St. Peter?  He was a candidate that said, up front, “I’m not a bank or a banker,” and so he came bearing no gifts and offering no inducements for votes – only effective advocacy for the long-neglected residents of St. Peter.  Where is the praise for that, ye critics?  And where is the credit for the party and its leadership for selecting such a transparent candidate?

In the meantime, as his political opponents try to create a breach that never was, they have nothing to say about the real breaches that happened during the by-election.  

The Antigua and Barbuda Electoral Commission (ABEC) had claimed that the “dirt” of the last general election – specifically, the boast that voters were transferred, as charity, into weak Labour seats, plus the allegation that hundreds of persons had been transferred by the late St. Peter MP into the constituency – would automatically be cleaned up.  How?  By virtue of “proof of address” being required for revalidation.

However, while the law-abiding dutifully took along their utility bill or bank statement to prove that, yes, we actually live in St. Peter, ABEC, on the eve of the by-election, took the decision NOT to require proof of address, after all, and to issue new cards on the strength of persons already being on the voters list.

And why, after the longstanding practice of parties’ mock stations not being allowed on the voting premises, were the dozens of brown-shirted Labour Party agents permitted to stand or sit outside every single voting station with their clipboards and lists to identify voters?  And, why, yet again, did the picture list have almost three dozen more names on the picture list than the other List of Electors?

The double standard stinks, and it needs to be talked about and condemned, especially since, one, all transfers are effected at ABEC’s headquarters; two, specific objections to the 2023 voting lists were ignored by Commission staff; and, three, last Tuesday there was no attempt at all to address the brown-shirt brigade’s activities.

So I invite those who now claim to admire Captain Wehner’s stoicism, discipline, and statesmanship, and those who have been quick to accuse and condemn his party for allowing the soldier to do the soldierly thing, to call out ABEC in similar fashion.

I invite them, also, to pay attention to the other commission – the Boundaries Commission – as a slip of the chief of staff’s tongue has alerted us to which government ministers exactly will be pulling the strings of the “renamed” commissioners.

The manipulation and the hypocrisy must be stopped.