Loyse Vin­cent

Leader of the Pro­gres­sive De­mo­c­ra­t­ic Pa­tri­ots (PDP) Wat­son Duke re­mains res­olute that he will not apol­o­gise for call­ing two To­ba­go women “stink and dut­ty” dur­ing the gen­er­al elec­tion cam­paign ear­li­er this month. Ap­pear­ing on a live so­cial me­dia post on Thurs­day, Au­gust 20, Duke said he was mere­ly quot­ing lyrics from Machel Mon­tano and Bun­ji Gar­lin’s 2017 song “Buss Head”, played the song dur­ing the live video and quot­ed the lyrics.

“Those words were com­posed by Machel Mon­tano and Bun­ji Gar­lin – you wine to it all the time, they are not my words but I think they are rel­e­vant for to­day. Be­fore you com­ment on an is­sue – Know the is­sue,” he said.

Duke’s re­sponse came af­ter Leader of the To­ba­go Coun­cil of the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) Tra­cy David­son-Ce­les­tine, while speak­ing at a To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly post-Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil Me­dia Brief­ing called on Duke to “man-up” and apol­o­gise in per­son for mak­ing the com­ments.

David­son-Ce­les­tine’s com­ments came af­ter the PDP’s Deputy Po­lit­i­cal Leader Far­ley Au­gus­tine apol­o­gised for Duke’s state­ments dur­ing a PDP press con­fer­ence on Wednes­day. Com­ment­ing on Au­gus­tine’s apol­o­gy, Duke said he had “no beef” with his col­league but no-one speaks on his be­half.

“I can­not fault the As­sem­bly­man for do­ing what he thought was right in the mo­ment...I have no prob­lem with that. How­ev­er, Wat­son Duke al­ways speaks for him­self. No­body speak (sic) for Wat­son Duke ex­cept my lawyer and he will have a day to speak for me in the courts of law.”

Duke, who named three women, said he would have his day in court as he has ini­ti­at­ed le­gal pro­ceed­ings against them. In the lead-up to last week’s gen­er­al elec­tion, one of the women post­ed state­ments pur­port­ing im­pro­pri­ety against Duke. His lawyer de­mand­ed she re­moved them. Her lawyer re­spond­ed to Duke by let­ter in­di­cat­ing that she had no in­ten­tion to agree to his re­quest.

The PDP po­lit­i­cal leader al­so took David­son-Ce­les­tine to task. He said the PNM should con­cen­trate on giv­ing To­ba­go hote­liers and their work­ers the $50 mil­lion COVID-19 grant for hote­liers to up­grade their prop­er­ty and the Salary and In­come Re­lief grants re­spec­tive­ly, in­stead of fo­cus­ing on him.

Guardian Me­dia reached out to the PDP’s Far­ley Au­gus­tine and Duke’s gen­er­al elec­tion run­ning mate Tashia Bur­ris for their re­ac­tions to the lat­est com­ments made by Wat­son Duke but our ef­forts were un­suc­cess­ful.