By Marlon Bute
Opposition Leader Ralph Gonsalves’s 47th independence anniversary message asks Vincentians to perform a remarkable feat of forgetting. Beginning with God, the Constitution and an appeal for peace, love and solidarity, he proceeds to describe a country enveloped in a “veritable nightmare”. The government elected less than a year ago, he contends, has contributed immensely to its terrible circumstances.
He accuses that government of revenge, victimisation, secrecy, and authoritarian tendencies, then calls upon the nation to arrest its “unmistakable current decline”. Listening, one could almost forget who governed this country for close to 25 years.
The convenience is obvious. His departure becomes the dividing line between achievement and deterioration. Everything troubling the country is pushed towards the new government, while the quarter-century that produced its inheritance slips quietly out of the account.
But history has dates, and the dead have names. Neither can be rearranged by an Independence message.
In 2022, St. Vincent and the Grenadines recorded 42 homicides, then a national record. In 2023, the toll rose to 55, of which police classified 52 as murders. Another 54 homicides followed in 2024. Gonsalves was prime minister throughout those years and held responsibility for national security. The bloodiest year in our history occurred under his administration.
Those figures describe families summoned to identify bodies, children growing up with an absence no election can repair, and communities learning to recognise gunfire. They describe the fear that entered ordinary routines and the violence that became part of our national conversation long before Nov. 27, 2025.
Overall reported crime fell during 2024, but the homicide toll remained just one below the record. Lethal violence had reached extraordinary proportions while Gonsalves governed. The new administration inherited that reality.
The public accounts carry their own testimony.
The International Monetary Fund reported in April 2026 that public debt reached approximately 113% of GDP in 2025, having risen by 45 percentage points since 2019. About half that increase occurred in the final two years. The country had been at high risk of debt distress since 2016. These vulnerabilities were established well before the change of administration in late November 2025.
Debt on that scale follows a government into every budget discussion. It competes with road repairs, hospital improvements, school maintenance, and investment in production. The pandemic, volcanic eruption and hurricanes imposed real costs. Those events form part of the history, alongside the borrowing, spending and policy choices of the government that managed them.
Gonsalves cannot claim ownership of the achievements of those years while leaving their obligations on someone else’s doorstep.
Our dependence on imported food tells another part of the story. Figures presented by Agriculture Minister Israel Bruce and published by his ministry put agricultural food imports at EC$209.1 million in 2020 and EC$314 million in 2024. In four years, the bill increased by EC$104.9 million — approximately 50%.
For a country with fertile soil and generations of agricultural knowledge, that dependence is a measure of vulnerability. It exposes households to foreign prices and freight charges while opportunities to produce, process and earn at home remain insufficiently developed. The money leaves; the need for dependable livelihoods remains.
Merchandise exports, meanwhile, contracted by 10.6% in 2023 to EC$110.2 million, according to the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank. WTO figures show merchandise imports that year of US$456.4 million against exports of US$40.8 million. We purchased more than eleven dollars’ worth of goods abroad for every dollar earned from merchandise exports. Tourism and other services are separate, but the imbalance in goods is unmistakable.
The international background matters. Small Caribbean economies operate within trading and financial arrangements they did little to design. Changes in preferential agricultural markets, global competition and dependence on foreign capital have narrowed their choices. The question confronting successive governments has been how to build domestic productive strength within those constraints.
In my assessment, beneath Gonsalves’s language of sovereignty and liberation lay too much accommodation to an imported, ill-suited neoliberal approach to development: the expectation that foreign investment, tourism, and integration into international markets would deliver prosperity without a sufficiently strong foundation of local ownership and production. Foreign investment has a place. The failure lies in allowing dependence to deepen while the domestic capacity needed to withstand external shocks remains weak.
These were conditions established under the administration he led: record bloodshed, sharply increased debt, rising food imports and a narrow merchandise export base. They cannot now be presented as discoveries about the government that succeeded him.
The physical inheritance is visible around us too. Deteriorating buildings, neglected maintenance and drainage problems have histories. Housing development, roads, and waterways require planning that extends beyond the next construction project or emergency repair. Years of inadequate attention accumulate until the consequences enter someone’s home or business.
I have watched floodwater enter my own business in Kingstown. Once the water recedes, the questions remain: where should it have flowed, what obstructed it, and how adequately were drainage, maintenance and development managed?
Heavy rainfall meets a landscape shaped by human decisions. Poor drainage, neglected watercourses, and inadequately planned construction can deepen the damage. Those decisions must be examined over the years in which they were made. The date of a flood cannot become the starting date of responsibility.
Gonsalves’s message depends on precisely that shortening of memory. He surveys a country shaped substantially by his own stewardship and invites Vincentians to locate its troubles in the months since his defeat.
It is telling, too, that after 27 years leading the ULP and close to 25 as prime minister, Gonsalves remains, at 80, determined to lead the opposition. Even the electorate’s overwhelming rejection has not persuaded him to make room for someone else.
His insistence on remaining at the centre suggests that he has come to regard leadership as a personal possession. The selfishness lies in expecting his party and the country to indefinitely accommodate an ambition the people have so decisively refused.
The NDP inherited a country with wounds, debts and unfinished work. Much of that inheritance was formed during his years in power.
Twenty-five years occupy too much of our national life to disappear between the lines of a speech. They remain in the public accounts, in the evidence of state-sanctioned corruption, in the condition of our communities, in the losses families carry and, in the work, now needed to repair the country. Gonsalves may wish to begin the story at his departure. Vincentians remember living through the chapters before it.
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