Nazar ‘Shell’ Mohamed, well-known businessman and father of Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed yesterday said that his decision to reach out to President Irfaan Ali last Friday stemmed from “personal anxiety” over the oppression he says that he and his family have been experiencing at the hands of the government.
The senior Mohamed, a gold-dealer who had been selected by the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) as its candidate for the Eccles/Ramsburg constituency in the 2023 Local Government Elections, told Kiskadee Watch that after returning home from masjid and thinking deeply about the political persecution on Friday, he just wanted it to stop.
He said the intention was not to have a back and forth with President Ali, but to share his feelings on the victimisation in a civil manner and ask him to consider how long more his family would be subjected to it. It is for this reason, he said, that when Ali attempted to call him after reading the messages, he chose not to answer.
Nazar Mohamed was speaking yesterday in the context of claims by President Ali that the correspondence amounted to an attempt to blackmail him. Two days before a video was released by Azruddin Mohamed alleging corruption linked to the President’s farm near St. Cuthbert’s Mission, Ali said he had been threatened that the material would be made public unless the government made amends with the Mohamed family, including by easing extradition proceedings involving members of the family.
Rejecting those claims, Nazar Mohamed said: “I didn’t know that he (Azruddin) was doing a video on the president. It was just, you know, coincidental. I had no idea that he was going to release a video of his farm, and so on,” Nazar Mohamed said, adding, “Azruddin doesn’t live under my roof. I’m an elderly man now, and I have absolutely no interest in his politics.”
He continued: “I came home from Masjid early in the morning (on Friday). I was in my living room, and I reflected upon everything that was going on with us, and our life, and my relationship with the PPP, and my business, you know, my family. I’m journeying now into old age, and it really bothers me, right?” Nazar Mohamed reflected.
“I don’t usually reach out to the president, especially since a few years. But I did reach out to him by a text message, you know, by a voice note. And that morning, I was overwhelmed. I came back from Masjid…asking Allah to relieve us from the situation, because it’s not nice; a very difficult situation we are in,” he expressed, adding, “And so, I reached out to him, not for any favour, but through my own personal anxiety because we are fighting an extradition…which the government at this stage can’t do nothing about…even though I’m 100% convinced that they are responsible for this.”
Nazar Mohamed stressed that he reached out to Ali because he was overwhelmed over what was happening to his family. “There is no need for me to lie. Being overwhelmed, I sent him this text. I treated him with a lot of respect. I asked him how much more are we going to go through this; that never in the history of this country a family has ever gone through so much political prosecution. How long more are you going to do this? Every little thing. You go on the road; the police are harassing you. So, how long, Skipper? Sir, how long are we going to go through this? Look what your government is doing to us.”
Meanwhile, from St Lucia where he is attending the CARICOM Heads of Government summit, Ali did not respond to any of the allegations raised in Mohamed’s 23-minute video on Sunday, but noted that when he returns home, he will conduct a tour of the farm. However, in the nearly six years that he has been President, Ali has never spoken about this farm, raising the question as to why he now saw it fit to take persons on a tour of it.
The initial questions to be addressed are how many acres of land the President controls in the area, when the property was acquired, the price paid, and how the purchase was financed. Given the reported scale of the farming operation, further questions arise over how any potential conflict of interest between the President’s public office and his private agricultural interests was managed.
The size and features of the sprawling property, as depicted in the photographs released by Mohamed, also raise questions about what approvals and permits were granted for the various activities on the site and whether the Environmental Protection Agency determined that an environmental impact assessment was unnecessary.
In the video, Azruddin Mohamed stood on a road near the property and provided his own cost estimates for the infrastructure, buildings, machinery, livestock and agricultural operations, noting that a presidential salary of $3.7 million per month could never finance a 150-acre ranch investment amounting to what he said was more than $2.2 billion.
Kiskadee Watch contacted the Head of the President’s Public Relations Department, Suelle Findlay-Williams multiple times on Sunday but never received a response.
Discussion