Renu­ka Singh

Ari­ma May­or and Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) can­di­date for D’Abadie/O’Meara Lisa Mor­ris-Ju­lian is deny­ing that her so­cial me­dia post about peo­ple steal­ing man­hole cov­ers to make “tawahs” was racist.

“What is racist about it? I have a tawah,” she said in a tele­phone in­ter­view yes­ter­day.

In the much-shared post, Mor­ris-Ju­lian said “Co­corite Road is a ma­jor road and falls un­der the MOW (Min­istry of Works). But thanks for the in­fo and I hope the peo­ple who keep steal­ing the man­hole cov­ers to make tawahs will stop too. We will send out a team.”

A tawah is a round, flat cook­ware usu­al­ly used to make roti.

Mor­ris-Ju­lian said she post­ed that state­ment back in 2017 and it be­came a court mat­ter.

She said she al­ready re­ceived apolo­gies from the peo­ple who called her a racist for that post but could not re­call who the apol­o­gy came from.

She di­rect­ed all ques­tions to her own lawyer, se­nior part­ner at Hove and As­so­ciates, Farai Hove Ma­sai­sai and pro­vid­ed a num­ber for him.

“It’s an old post and it was re­gard­ing some­one who fell in­to a man­hole,” she said.

When asked about whether she saw any hint of racism in her post, Mor­ris-Ju­lian said she didn’t “ap­pre­ci­ate the im­pli­ca­tion.”

“It was some­thing that was dealt with a cou­ple years ago and peo­ple who pushed that had to apol­o­gise to me for in­sin­u­at­ing and say­ing that I was racist,” she said.

The post was re-shared on so­cial me­dia and trig­gered strong views. Peo­ple al­so di­rect­ed her to the scrap iron deal­ers rather than roti mak­ers.

Ma­sai­sai pro­vid­ed a let­ter, dat­ed No­vem­ber 2018 in which a lawyer, Bri­an Baig, rep­re­sent­ed a woman on­ly called Mrs Mathu­ra apol­o­gised for “com­ments that was stat­ed on Face­book.” The apol­o­gy let­ter al­so states that Mrs Mathu­ra with­drew the com­ments she made and gave the as­sur­ance that she would “cease and de­sist” from mak­ing sim­i­lar state­ments to­wards Mor­ris-Ju­lian.

“On the is­sue of dam­ages, Mrs Mathu­ra is a woman of sim­ple means and there­fore ask­ing for her un­equiv­o­cal apol­o­gy can suf­fice as she is un­able to pay any fi­nan­cial sums of dam­ages,” he said.