Dominic Gaskin: A star is born
Leonard Gildarie asked me on Saturday afternoon on the Election Watch programme on Kaieteur News why Dominic Gaskin did what he did. Here is the print version of my oral delivery.
I submitted that Gaskin’s motive was driven by philosophy and Guyanese sociology. I begin with the philosophical part. Quite a substantial number of philosophers throughout the ages have concluded there are congenital flaws in the nature of Homo sapiens.
Perhaps no thinker has done it with graphic depiction as Arthur Koestler. Reading Koester on Homo sapiens is not for the faint-hearted. Philosophy can be a really depressing subject.
Ulele Burnham, the daughter of the late president, Forbes Burnham, does not think so (see her August 21, 2007 response to me on my August 2007column on the 22nd death anniversary of her father; she asserts that, “philosophy is a discipline aimed at elevating thought, reason and reflection over impulse and instinct….”). I would suggest you read Koestler and try not to be depressed about what he wrote about us, humans.
Koestler still felt that humans can traverse their inherent limitations and achieve complete rationality.
Few philosophers deny that despite the natural defects in character, humans are capable of infinite humanity. Here is where Dominic Gaskin comes in.
In offering my explanation to Gildarie, I suggested that the events in Guyana since March 4 may have touched the inner sanctums of the human psyche and Gaskin evoked what still remains in Homo sapiens and what keeps civilization going – the power of conscience.
A prominent citizen of Guyana who is very much alive confessed to me that he killed someone. But he is never the same. I noticed that he was never the same person. This is where conscience comes in.
Humans who prove Koestler right sometimes are never the same when they do untold harm to people. Many of them commit suicide in later life. The father of a boy who exacted money from Michael Jackson over threats to go public with allegation of sexual harassment by Jackson killed himself last year.
Gaskin may have felt that what he was seeing last Wednesday was too unbearable and that conscience would not allow him to remain silent or aloof from the circumstances of insanity before his eyes.
I was involved in protest against rigged elections from 1973 until 1985. I saw the crazy subverting of the free process of election under Forbes Burnham but the 1985 election under President Hoyte was the most brazen vulgarity of any election.
The attempts to rig the 2020 poll from Wednesday afternoon of March 4, I say with unambiguous grammar, was the most depraved misconduct of an election process recent times have seen in any part of the world.
It has come to where we are because conscience drove countless Guyanese and foreigners to denounce the uncivilized descent. This is where Gaskin stepped in.
The second example is the sociological motive. Dominic Gaskin was born into a middle class family whose father was a businessman and his mom, a Caucasian European. His class involvement revolved around the elite light-complexioned Georgetown middle class.
His associates removed themselves from the PNC under Robert Corbin for reasons of strict class elitism (much to Corbin’s unabated anger) and formed a political party that they wanted to be free from ethnic patronage.
The fallout of Khemraj Ramjattan from the PPP offered this new grouping a chance to wedge itself between the PPP and PNC and carve out a non-racial future for Guyana (see my Monday column of November 18, 2019 titled, “A history of the AFC: Part 1.”)
Gaskin was a founder-member of the AFC and from its birth of 2005 until maybe the day he publicly unannounced he was not happy with the results of the Region Four tabulation, he was part of a five-member team that was the nucleus of the AFC. Those five persons decide everything for the AFC.
Gaskin was the more reserved and more forthright member of the five-person cabal and was generally seen as more democratic.
Because of this perception of him by his colleagues, his words carried sway at meetings and conferences of the AFC.
The AFC did what no other third party has done in Guyana or any other CARICOM nation.
It won seats and increased its percentage with every election, looking set to displace both PPP and PNC.
Then it became part of a partnership with a formation that was dominated by the PNC. Sadly, after 2015 it lost its gloss, shine, aura, magic and raison d’etre.
After Wednesday, March 4, Gaskin may have realized this is not what he wants for Guyana. This is not why he helped to birth the AFC.
