Ani­ka Gumbs-San­di­ford

"Let he who is with­out sin cast the first stone." Tak­ing a quote from the Holy Bible the younger sis­ter of de­posed Op­po­si­tion Leader Bas­deo Pan­day, Leela, has come to his de­fence to si­lence de­trac­tors bent on de­stroy­ing his lega­cy. "No­body is a saint. We are all hu­man be­ings and have all made bad de­ci­sions and choic­es in our lives. The on­ly way to grow is to make er­rors and to learn from them. "We are nev­er too old to learn. Peo­ple just need to leave my broth­er alone right now. Stop talk­ing about him." The younger Pan­day, who has ex­pressed ab­solute­ly no in­ter­est in ever throw­ing her hat in­to the po­lit­i­cal ring, is con­vinced more than ever that she made the right de­ci­sion.

Pol­i­tics takes away hu­man­i­ty

"Pol­i­tics takes away your hu­man­i­ty. You be­come a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent per­son than who you were be­fore you en­tered the race. It is a choice you have to make. When you choose your path no­body can tell you what di­rec­tion to go. Our des­tiny is to­tal­ly up to us." Asked whether she in­tends to re­main a mem­ber of the UNC an un­cer­tain Leela re­spond­ed: "What UNC? How can I sup­port them. They hi­jacked the par­ty my broth­er built. I knew they want­ed him out but I was not ex­pect­ing them to cut him down like this. They chop, chop, chop un­til they suc­ceed­ed. I could nev­er vote for them." How­ev­er, she has a word of ad­vice for the "new own­ers of the UNC." "Take the par­ty and move on. I re­al­ly do not know how much more peo­ple could deal with; it is an every­day back-bit­ing and be­tray­ing. "They want­ed the par­ty; they got the par­ty, now move on. "What is next?" a plain speak­ing Leela asked.