Dominic Gaskin: His role in a destructive marriage

Aug 19, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

---

Dominic Gaskin has emerged as one of the largest names in political courage during the five months of election rigging by the GECOM Secretariat, the three PNC commissioners and the APNU+AFC. He broke ranks with his AFC middle class autocrats. It was not only who he was in the AFC’s leadership but who he was in the society – the son-in-law of President David Granger.
From here on, Gaskin’s name will travel positively throughout society and history. But the types like Gaskin also lived political lives that contributed to the historical swamps that have drowned Guyana. Once you talk about Gaskin and the AFC, the name Henry Jeffrey comes to mind.
A born again democrat, Jeffrey sermonizes Guyanese with wishes, hopes and dreams of a society where competition for ethnic domination can be extirpated through deep, constitutional reform. Jeffrey sees election as an arena for bloody confrontation between the Indianized PPP and Africanized PNC having been a PPP minister for 16 years; not 16 months but 16 years. The point is that Jeffrey perpetuated the atmosphere of ethnic competition by choosing sides.
In an interview with Kaieteur Radio, Gaskin offered some lamentations about the Mephisto waltz between the AFC and PNC after they both got power in 2015. Gaskin felt the AFC did a Faustian dedication to the PNC and lost not only its identity but its soul. But guess who was part of the AFC’s Mephistophelean journey? Gaskin himself.
Here is what Gaskin told the Stabroek News as reported in that paper of July 18, 2016: “Certainly at the Cabinet level there is an obligation, there is a collective responsibility for decision-making at that level and therefore …there can be no, I guess, division on that level and that is just the reality of a Cabinet.” For more of Gaskin’s support for the coalition government see my article, Tuesday, July 19, 2016, “The dialectics of the Minister of Business.”
Square this with the following words of Gaskin to Kaieteur Radio this week: “The AFC, during its term in office as a coalition partner, may have placed too much emphasis on maintaining the coalition to the detriment of the AFC as an independent party.” You read Gaskin, and you do not know he was a member of the gang of five in the AFC, then, you would see him as a sound political theorist.
The decision to sell its soul to the AFC was one that Gaskin pioneered along with other members of the gang of five. In another interview with the Stabroek News, he said the AFC will not police APNU in government. The rest of the cabal was Raphael Trotman, Khemraj Ramjattan, Cathy Hughes and David Patterson. This was a tightly knitted group that even the 33-member executive committee kowtowed to. No one, except Nigel Hughes, was given any latitude to be near the receptacle of power inside the AFC.
When a second tier leader, Marlon Williams, challenged David Patterson in February 2017 for the position of General Secretary and won that was the end of Williams’ political career. The gang of five, including Gaskin, crucified Williams. The gang of five thought that Williams was extremely obnoxious to challenge a founding member.
The gang of five made his life a miserable one. There were handsome donations from prominent persons and there were bright professionals but the gang of five made sure they never entered the kingdom of the incestuous cabal. Gaskin as the treasurer practiced widespread favouritism. He would sign a cheque without asking for details once the request came from a member of the inner circle. Once it came from outside the elite ring cabal, Gaskin would ask a million questions and put them through the mill.
There was a sixth person in the AFC’s mansion – the chairman, Nigel Hughes. But Hughes was never accorded incestuous decorations for two reasons. First, he was not a founding member, and secondly, his ideological orientations had little in common with the gang of five. This difference eventually led to his 2017 departure.
A sad example of the mistreatment of Hughes was the 2016 local government election. Given his Rodneyite politics, he believed there should be decentralized power, so he backed an independent group in Bartica named BIGGA over the APNU+AFC slate. From there on the knives were out for Hughes. Nagamootoo took Hughes placed but there was no gang of six because Nagamootoo was just not interested in the AFC’s war-room just about furthering his personal ambition.
Gaskin saved his soul by denouncing rigged elections. He showed decency and moral strength and has now gone into the history books. But he played a huge part in cementing the AFC’s marriage to the PNC.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

---

---