For The Record: Why Dominica’s First Prime Minister Patrick John was Overthrown

After individuals apologized for Dominica’s first Prime Minister Patrick Roland John saying John was “consumed by his everlasting love for all people” at John’s funeral in 2021 and the main celebrant of John’s funeral mass said, “let history be the judge of his successes or failures,” Dominica’s political Opposition is whitewashing Dominica’s historical record.

            On February 19, 2024, a caller to the Opposition’s main political call-in radio show, Matt in the Morning: The Hot Seat on Q95FM say that, “they overthrow Patrick John for forty-something dollars.”

            A week earlier, another caller made the same claim, except he specified the cause of John’s overthrow to be “forty-seven dollars.”

            First and foremost, no amount of dollars was the cause of John’s overthrow. The cause was not financial. It was bloody murder—brutality. PM Patrick John was overthrown because troops of the since-disbanded Dominica Defense Force (DDF) of which he was a ‘Colonel’ and Commander-in-Chief shot bullets through the body of nineteen-year-old Phillip Timothy, a demonstrator, shortly after 10: 00 am on Tuesday May 29, 1979. Timothy died on the spot. Also, an unbaptized and unnamed baby died in their home by suffocation from the smoke fired by the DDF. Twenty-three other civilians were injured. Many more were beaten.

After these acts of brutality, a group of political and union leaders who had organized the demonstration retreated to the Goodwill Parish Hall. They called on John to resign. He refused. They called for a national strike to pressure John to resign. He would not. Civilians stoned and burned and looted private and public property until enough Elected Representatives in Parliament defected from John.

            Use of the word ‘overthrow’ begs for qualification. For the record, PM Patrick Roland John was relieved of his duties as PM on June 21, 1979, in what Dr. Nicholas J. O. Liverpool, later President of Dominica classified as a ‘civilian coup.’  It was a coup because it ended John’s tenure and there was violence. However, the violence was by civilians and not by armed forces, and certainly not armed forces commissioned by any government.

            However, Patrick John lost his tenure when his appointment was revoked because a successor, Oliver J. ‘OJ’ Seraphin was constitutionally appointed PM. Seraphin was appointed PM when more than eleven, a simple majority of Elected Representatives switched their support from John to Seraphin. The end of John’s tenure happened in Parliament and was witnessed and recorded. Further, the sequence of events was investigated by a three-person Commission of Inquiry from whose account the above-mentioned facts were extracted.

            The reference to dollars comes from a separate matter.

            John’s overthrow contributed brutality as a political limitation of the Eastern Caribbean (EC) Model. This means that the people by their action to overthrow John wrote into the agreement between leaders and followers that brutality would not be tolerated. John’s overthrow also qualifies him as lacking the capacity to deliver the Model.

            John was the first and last Dominica PM to be brutal and to be overthrown. Leadership lesson learned.

            How John’s tenure ended and why are important facts that must remain clear.