LIKE most (maybe all) columnists in the entire world, I have been concentrating on the Trump phenomenon.
So, from Thursday to Sunday, my pieces were on Trump. I will return to Trump because there are multiple dimensions to his victory that have added important changes to political theory.

Before the Trump triumph, I decided I would look at the Nigel Hughes “apology” controversy. So here it is. Nigel at a press conference when asked if the AFC should apologise for its role in the 2020 election conspiracy (my word), responded by asking what is there to apologise for. Here are his words: “I’m not sure what we would apologise for.

If you’re talking about our role in elections, I would ask you to identify to me specifically what it is that you are saying the AFC did in the elections for which you are seeking an apology,”
That reaction was completely surprising to me because Nigel was not part of the AFC at any level since 2016. He resigned from the chairmanship of the AFC in that year and was no longer part of the three branches of authority within the AFC – congress, executive committee and management committee. As the years went by, Nigel announced twice that he was finished with politics.

What his 2016 resignation meant was that from March to July 2020, he would not have had direct knowledge of what the AFC was doing in relation to the election because he was not present at the meetings in those five months in the war room of the AFC. I would have thought that a wiser approach would have been to tell the reporter that he was not part of the AFC’s decision-making machinery and therefore he was in no position to answer the question.

That was safer ground to walk on than the pathway of asking the reporter what is there to apologise for. If Nigel was told by his close comrades that the AFC did not participate in the election conspiracy, then he had to know by 2024 that those words were not factual reflections. He had to know that by 2024, many persons present in the AFC’s war room in 2020 have subsequently said publicly that there were attempts to undermine the factual, legitimate, legal results of the 2020 election.

Four persons were part of the AFC’s war room and they saw how the AFC behaved during the election crisis. Those four persons are Trevor Williams, Dominic Gaskin, Leonard Craig, then Deputy General Secretary of the AFC, and Michael Carrington.
All four persons have publicly commented that the election was lost by APNU+AFC and that there were attempts to change the results. Here is what Dominic Gaskin wrote on his Facebook page of July 17, 2020: “To my colleague in the coalition, I make one final appeal.

You are losing political ground. You cannot win this battle. Find a way out. It will be easier than trying to do so tomorrow. And for God’s sake stop abusing everyone who dares to suggest that you lost the election. There is not a shred of evidence to suggest otherwise.”
Mr. Gaskin on three appearances on the Freddie Kissoon Show acknowledged that the coalition attempted to change the election results. On the same programme, Trevor Williams made similar remarks.

Three times on the same show, Leonard Craig admitted that APNU+AFC falsified numbers to give them victory. Now if Craig was part of the nerve-centre of the AFC as Deputy General Secretary, and he has made that admission, can’t it be concluded that he knows what Nigel does not know?

But the biggest contradiction in the Nigel Hughes declaration is Michael Carrington, the current Deputy Chairman of the AFC. Four times on the Freddie Kissoon Show, Carrington admitted that there were wrong things done by the APNU+AFC in the election.
In his recent appearance on the show, Carrington informed viewers that his position is third in line of authority in the AFC and he offered an apology for the AFC’s role in the election and said more apologies will be forthcoming. Could it be that is the reason why the reporter put the question to Nigel?

Now interesting to note is that Carrington who publicly apologised for AFC’s role in the 2020 national election sat right next to Nigel when the apology question was asked. And no one at that AFC press conference did the right thing by asking Carrington to handle the question. I contacted Carrington for permission to quote here what he said on the Freddie Kissoon Show. He agreed and indicated that his apology stands.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.