By *Guevara Leacock
On A View from the Outside this week, we turn our attention to the conduct of public officers at home and abroad, with the view being that a public office is not a thing to be used to advance party political interests regardless of which party is in power.
Does this sentence ring a bell? “Fellas tell me that is what you are like in Cabinet.”
Our view this week is not about any one public officer, ministry or any one incident. It is about a duty that every public officer in St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) carries, whether they work in a ministry in Kingstown or in one of our diplomatic missions abroad. We on A View from the Outside recognise that it is a duty that may be hard to honour nine months after a change of government, in a country where the previous government was in office for 24 years. Some Vincentians in public employment may struggle to be politically neutral.
Let us start with the simplest fact in our system of government. Governments change. The State does not. Political parties contest elections; public officers do not. Ministers arrive and ministers leave, and in between, the passports still have to be issued, the teachers still have to be paid, the customs entries and duties still have to be processed and the country still has to be represented at whatever table it is invited to. Every person who takes a job in the public service of SVG takes on a duty that sits above whatever he or she happens to think of the government of the day.
What exactly does that mean? It means that a public officer is free to believe the New Democratic Party (NDP) government is doing a fine job or a terrible one. They are free to say that to a husband or wife, other relatives or friends. What the public officer cannot do is turn their job into a political weapon.
Public officers should not sit on files to make a minister look bad. They should not pass confidential information to political opponents. They should not slow down a lawful decision because they do not like where it came from. They should not use the documents, the contacts or the authority that came with their job to run a political campaign of their own.
The Civil Service Orders, which governs how civil servants in SVG should conduct themselves, place restrictions on the political activity of public officers, and those restrictions are not there by accident. A professional public service has to be capable of serving whichever government the people elect.
That principle does not weaken when the officer is posted overseas. If anything, the responsibility is heavier.
An embassy, a high commission or a consulate of SVG is not the property or arm of a political party. It is also not a small independent republic where public officers posted there or those who head the mission decide which instructions from Kingstown they will carry out and which they will quietly ignore. Those offices are the State of SVG standing in another country. When they speak, SVG speaks. When the work they produce is sloppy, SVG look sloppy.
A public officer posted abroad is entitled to disagree with the foreign policy they are asked to carry out. They are not entitled, though, to keep the salary, the titles and the access while working to undermine the government, the head of the mission and country. If a public officer reaches the point where their politics make the job impossible, the honest course of action is to resign. People have done it before.
Serving the government of the day is not the same thing as serving the governing political party. Ministries, missions, official information, public money, government vehicles and the working hours of civil servants belong to the State. They are paid for by all Vincentians, including the people who voted the other way. A party that wins a general election receives the authority to govern. The country does not become its property.
No government minister should ask a civil servant to do party political work. No public officer should be told to defend a party from fair criticism, to make life difficult for its opponents, or to put public resources behind any political campaign. Neutrality runs in both directions or it is not neutrality at all. A public officer must not sabotage the government to help the opposition, and public officers must not be used by a government to beat the opposition.
Political neutrality is not a hiding place for illegality. An instruction does not become lawful because a government minister gave it. Where a public officer sees corruption or a breach of the law, the duty is to report it, and to report it through a channel that exists for that purpose. But there is a real difference between reporting suspected wrongdoing through a proper channel and quietly feeding useful material to political opponents in order to damage a government. One is accountability. The other may be a misuse of the office.
Think about the highly sensitive information to which public officers have access, including Cabinet papers, financial information, personnel files, diplomatic correspondence, draft legislation and negotiating positions that the country has not yet revealed to its citizens. They are given access to all of that information because their job cannot be done without it. The information is not to be used as ammunition against the sitting government.
We on A View from the Outside want to be clear on this point, because it is being whispered about in SVG. A civil servant who takes a Cabinet paper, a finance file, a personnel record, a memo or a diplomatic cable and hands it to the leadership of the opposition is not a whistleblower. They are simply dishonest and not acting in the public interest. They are taking material that belongs to the State and using it to help one political party injure another, and is doing so while drawing a salary paid by every taxpayer in SVG.
Depending on what the document is, that public officer may also be committing an offence. The fact that the information turns out to embarrass the government changes none of that.
Consider, too, where this abhorrent behaviour leaves the public officer. Once the material leaves their hands, they have no control over it at all. They cannot decide when it is used, how it is described, or on which radio programme it turns up on a Wednesday morning.
Public officers should not rely on the discretion of politicians whose interest in them lasts as long as the information does. If the leak is traced back, the people who received it will not be sitting beside them in their defence. In fact, you may hear famous statements like “it wasn’t me” or “no one told me anything”. Do not become the person about whom it is said: “Fellas tell me that …”
Public officers should not aid and abet the opposition.
For 24 years, many Vincentians watched the line between the party and the State become thinner and thinner. Several persons within the public service learned that the way to progress was to be seen in the right colour at the right function.
Between 2001 and 2025, several public servants, junior and senior, were seen wearing party colours at political party events. That is a real grievance and it should be condemned. But the answer to a public service that was politicised in one direction is not to politicise the public service in the other direction. Two wrongs have never yet made a right and it certainly will not produce a professional civil service.
We on A View from the Outside say that the test of a professional public officer is a simple one. Can you serve faithfully a government that you did not vote for? If the answer is yes, the country is in decent hands. If the answer is no, the honourable exit is the front door. Leave.
Because in the end the public service does not belong to the government. It does not belong to the opposition. It belongs to the people of SVG.
So in the coming days, when somebody tells you that a public officer is entitled to work quietly against a government they do not support, ask them one simple question. Ask them whether they would say the same thing about a public officer working quietly against a government they do support. If the answer changes depending on who is in office, then it was never a principle in the first place.
*Guevara Leacock is a barrister at law of Lincoln’s Inn in England and an attorney at law in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. He has a keen interest in history and politics and is a social commentator.
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