By Jonathan Marks
“Everybody for them lining up at the trough.”
That’s what Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves said this Sunday on We FM. He didn’t use the word “pigs” — he didn’t need to. The meaning was unmistakable. Only animals eat at a trough. Only pigs line up there. And for a leader to speak that way about the people he governs is an act of deep contempt.
After 25 years of gluttony — he and those around him feeding from the public table — Gonsalves now dares to imply that others are greedy. The irony is as thick as it is insulting.
And for a man of Portuguese descent — a white man — to make such an inference about a Black-majority nation is not simply arrogant; the comment itself is racist. It reeks of the same plantation mentality that tells Black people they are lesser, that the country belongs to a “ruling class,” and that power is theirs by right of inheritance.
We’ve seen this before — not just from the father, but from the son. When Storm Gonsalves threatened civil servants to “count their days”, he was displaying that same warped sense of ownership: the belief that St. Vincent and the Grenadines belongs to them, that citizens are servants to be dismissed or punished for dissent.
But we are not servants. We are not animals. We are the descendants of enslaved Africans who resisted bondage, and of the Garifuna — the proud union of Kalinago and African blood — who fought to defend this land with their lives. That is who we are: proud, resilient, free.
And yet, when Gonsalves made his remarks on We FM, those who should have known better — Joel Providence and Philibert John — said nothing. No challenge. No rebuke. Their silence was deafening, and it revealed how normalised this arrogance has become.
This is what St. Vincent has come to: insult after insult, disdain after disdain, and a prime minister who behaves as though this country were his inheritance. But it is not.
St. Vincent and the Grenadines is not your plantation. It belongs to the people.
Ralph Gonsalves is out of place. Disrespectful. His comment was racist. And it’s time for him to go.
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The amazing thing about all of this is that the PM was voted into Office five times by Vincentians.
We hope enough Vincentians have awaken to who Ralph Gonsalves truly is.
They should vote him and the ULP out of Office. Despite the many BRIBES.
What really amazes me too is the black people who sit in his Cabinet and support policies that work against the majority of Vincentian people.
Not a single one of them have jumped ship in the last 24 years.
Perhaps they are afraid of the consequences.
I know a lot of people in SVG and the only person I would describe as a gluttonous obese pig is Ralph Gonsalves. I had lunch with him once and can confirm, he looks like a lig, eats like a pig, and smells like a pig.