Activist Ramon ‘Rambo’ Gaskin dies

Last Updated on Sunday, 21 July 2024, 9:25 by Writer

Ramon Gaskin.

Well-known political activist and associate of the governing People’s Progressive Party (PPP), Ramon ‘Rambo’ Gaskin died on Saturday after a prolonged illness, well-placed sources said.

He succumbed at the privately-owned Woodlands Hospital at 82 years old.

Gaskin first rose to national prominence shortly after the PPP won the 1992 general and regional elections and he was appointed the Chairman of Guyana Power and Light. He had dubbed himself as “I’m the man to end all blackouts.”

He later fell out with the PPP, the party that had granted him a scholarship to study in the then Soviet Union in the 1960s. Always regarding himself as a hardline communist ideologue, he later worked for at least two big locally-owned private sector companies as well as being an advocate for workers’ rights.

Gaskin attended a PPP 2020 election campaign meeting in Enmore in the company of several of his old “comrades”. Longtime friend of over 50 years, PPP Executive Member Neil Kumar said Guyana is poorer for Gaskin’s demise. “It’s a loss to Guyana, whatever he was. He was a comrade. For me, he was a comrade. He was always a very jovial character. Not everybody who criticises you is wrong and he was with the government. He was a good friend of us,” Mr Kumar told Demerara Waves Online News.

Despite his PPP sympathies, Mr Gaskin was very outspoken on issues of corruption and bad governance. In recent years, he was a staunch civil society advocate for Guyana getting a greater share of the oil revenues and that ExxonMobil and its co-venturers abide by the letter and spirit of the contract and law based on his interpretation.

He was the applicant in a number of cases involving the oil sector, most recently losing one at the level of Guyana’s highest court, the Caribbean Court of Justice.

For several years, Gaskin had harboured the ambition of forming “The Rambo Party”.