Former Business Minister Dominic Gaskin has described the APNU+AFC coalition government’s rental of a house as a drug bond for $12.5 million per month as a “scampish deal”, while also criticising the administration’s early decision to raise ministerial salaries as politically imprudent.
Speaking on the Starting Point podcast, Gaskin, who served as Minister of Business from 2015 to 2019, offered a candid assessment of his party’s performance during its time in office. He said the 50 per cent salary hike within the first four months of the administration’s tenure was “politically short-sighted” and should have been deferred or made retroactive. “It looked bad,” he contended.
On the controversial drug bond rental by the Ministry of Health, Gaskin said while the rationale might have been plausible to a point, the deal “was obviously a setup” and reeked of impropriety.
“A nice word is ‘scampishness’,” he said, adding that by the time the deal reached Cabinet, it had already been signed.
Despite these criticisms, Gaskin pointed to several achievements under the APNU+AFC administration. Among them, he listed the holding of local government elections for the first time in over two decades, the naming of four new hinterland townships—Lethem, Bartica, Mahdia and Mabaruma—and the paving of roads in interior communities.
He also cited modest tax reforms that provided income tax relief through deductible NIS contributions and a shift towards a more progressive tax structure, along with a reduction in VAT from 16 to 14 per cent. On the foreign policy front, Gaskin said the referral of the Guyana-Venezuela border controversy to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) was a significant achievement that took years of coordinated diplomacy.
However, he acknowledged policy missteps, including the imposition of VAT on private education, internet services, and utility bills—decisions he said alienated key sections of the electorate. Gaskin also defended the closure of several sugar estates as fiscally necessary but admitted the transition for displaced workers was poorly managed.
Reflecting on the coalition’s 2020 electoral loss, Gaskin said the government failed to regain the trust of swing voters and made matters worse by refusing to concede. He was among the first coalition officials to publicly reject attempts to retain power unlawfully.
“I think we were a fairly decent government—no better or worse than others,” Gaskin said, “but we made some blunders that cost us support.”
