ROSEAU, Dominica, CMC – Attorney General Levi Peter is coming under increasing pressure to resign after he referred to the opposition nominee for the post of President of Dominica as “a drumstick.”
During last week’s parliamentary vote for the new president to replace Charles Savarin, whose two five-year terms end on Sunday, Peter told legislators that the opposition should have supported the government’s nominee, Sylvanie Burton.
Levi told legislators that he had hoped the opposition “would have at least said, we have concerns, but we will support.
“But no, they chose to put up a drumstick. Mr. Speaker, that’s the height of idiocy. As the English would say, this is a vision where there is no possibility, as the Ent, a snowball chance in hell that that candidate could be elected in this House,” he added.
Dominica’s first-ever female head of state was elected by a margin of 205, with six government legislators and one opposition member absent.
Mrs. Burton and the opposition nominee, Mrs. Anette Sanford, are from the Kaliangoo Territory, where the descendants of the country’s indigenous people, the Caribs, still reside.
Mrs Burton has been a senior public servant since 2014. When she retired, she was the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of the Environment, Rural Modernisation, Kalinagoo Upliftment and Constituency Empowerment.
She has been a Justice of the Peace for 25 years and holds a master’s Degree in Project Management and a Bachelor’s Degree in Rural Development.
Mrs. Sanford is a registered nurse and clinical instructor at the Dominica State College. She is a graduate of the University of Edinburgh with a Bachelor’s Degree in Nursing. She also holds a Post Graduate Certificate in Health Care Administration from St. Lawrence College in Ontario, Canada. She is pursuing a Master’s Degree online in International Public Health at the University of Liverpool, England.
Mrs. Sanford also served as an opposition legislator between 2020-22.
In a statement, Mrs. Sanford described Peter’s remarks as “racist, abusive, and discriminatory on both moral and legal grounds.
“As an indigenous woman, listening to the Attorney General, I wondered to myself, whether he’s even oriented to the context of the event, and more so, whether I had changed my indigenous Kalinago identity by some miracle,” she said, adding “I felt lynched for accepting the nomination under which I have the full right to do so under the constitution of Dominica.”
Sanford called upon the Minister of Gender Affairs and the Minister of Kalinago Affairs to condemn the Attorney General’s statement and advocate for his resignation.
President of the Dominica Nurses Association, Yolanda Rodney Jno Baptiste, said the association wanted to record “its objection…to Sandford being referred to as a drumstick in the Dominica Parliament on September 27, 2023.
” This gross lack of respect to one nurse can be regarded as disrespectful to nurses, Kalinagoo women, and all women by extension,” she said, noting that a time when the nursing profession here is under tremendous pressure due to several factors, “this statement can only serve to undermine the morale of our hard-working nurses.”
“In this regard, we are calling on the Attorney General to extend a public apology to Mrs. Sanford,” she added.
In its statement, the Dominica National Council of Women(DNCW) said it was disturbed by Levi’s statement to attack Mrs. Sanford “in the most degrading way.
“Every woman should condemn this statement and should be equally angry. We cannot pull down one woman to pull up another,” the DNCW said, adding, “Therefore, we have no choice but to ask the Attorney General to withdraw this statement or resign.”
In a statement, women and child rights advocate Delia Cuffy-Weekes said that Levi’s report showed that he “blatantly ignores Dominicans’ right to freedom of choice and freedom of association as enshrined in the Constitution.
“The Attorney General shows how classless and clueless he is by referring to a female Presidential Nominee as a drumstick,” she said, adding, “Is he aware that by referring to the female as ‘drumstick’ he has stripped a human being of her humanity and now equates her with ‘meat’?
“Does he also know that one of the meanings for ‘drumstick’ in the urban dictionary is “A term used to describe the female wingman? Typically brought out to bars and clubs to prevent social awkwardness by providing entertainment for an interested party’s wingman. The drumstick is not meant to outshine the primary party.”
“I am putting the AG on notice that the women of Dominica will not take this insult lightly. A public apology to the female whose reputation had been dragged through the mud by his very utterance is in order!
“His less than honorable behaviour in the Honourable House requires that he steps down from the position to allow one with more integrity to correctly fulfill the mandate of legally advising the government,” Cuffy-Weekes adde
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