Opposition politics

By *Jomo Sanga Thomas

(“Plain Talk” April 11, 2025)

“We are playing with politics without principle, policies without the intention to ever realise them and leadership without vision. That’s our difficulty. People go to their graves [heartbroken] from empty promises and betrayal.” — Alan Boesak, a legendary South African anti-apartheid fighter.

As elections draw nearer, an increasingly nasty and cowardly saying is making the rounds. It is pushed by sensible people, including many who formerly supported PM Gonsalves’ Unity Labour Party. “Ralph is now ‘waste down.’ He and the local and foreign parasitic elite around him are crappy, shitty, vulgar, suffocatingly undemocratic and unfathomably greedy, but there is no opposition.” Such simplistic, anti-national rhetoric is music to Gonsalves’ ears. 

Are we such suckers for punishment!? Are we prepared to willingly sign on to our own dehumanisation? We cannot shirk our responsibility to the nation and further burden future generations. Most of us have recognised that the ship of state is floundering. By every important metric, people’s lives are in shambles. Only a tiny band can truthfully say that their lives have been made materially better since 2020. Yet some say if better can’t be done, let worse continue. Such utterings are the contaminated vibrations of a governing elite that finds it extremely difficult to inspire citizens. Learned helplessness is alien to our people’s history and tradition. Political parties emerged in the 1950’s, a mere 75 years ago, with the emergence of the 8 Army of Liberation. 

A quick review of our history demonstrates that we have done pretty well without them. 

Our nation experienced the shortest period of organised slavery in the Caribbean before the abolition of slavery in 1834. Our people never accepted enslavement. They were enslaved but never slaves to their condition. Our forebears fought and died to protect our nation’s independence from white colonial domination in the first and second patriotic wars between 1763 and 1797.

In 1935, our people rose again in righteous indignation following the colonial legislators’ incendiary proposal to increase the tax on matches and kerosene oil. Many were shot, brutalised and jailed. Samuel “Sheriff” Lewis, Mertha Butt and others rebelled without weapons to say enough is enough. 

In 1975, hundreds of citizens joined in solidarity with the nation’s teachers, demanding better working conditions and a salary increase. The Labour Party government teargassed them, but they remained defiant.

In 1981, people took to the streets in their thousands to protest two pieces of undemocratic, anti-people legislation that the autocratic premier Milton Cato had introduced to parliament. 

And again, in June 2000 following the James Mitchell-led NDP introduction of legislation dubbed the “Greedy Bill” to reward politicians and their spouses with pensions, gratuity and perks while it steadfastly refused to discuss salary increases and better working conditions for government employees, doctors, teachers, nurses, civil servants, (not another red cent fo dem), citizens took to the streets in a series of demonstrations that led to a shortened fourth term by the NDP. 

In 2021, when the ULP government mandated the untested and dangerous vaccines for some workers, Vincentians refused to support the government’s effort to stigmatise and dismiss the workers. In a show of solidarity, and against the advice of Gonsalves and Friday, SVG had the lowest vaccination rate in the entire Caribbean. 

Vincentians are reminded of this glorious history because citizens did not sit back and say there was no opposition. At each turn, they either took matters into their own hands or joined in solidarity with other civil society organisations to protest what was wrong and oppressive. They did not wait for recognised groups, organisations, or individuals to lead them or beg them to join in defence of their interests. 

What has happened since? Who or what has dulled our consciousness? 

Any patriot, nationalist or revolutionary who lines up behind Gonsalves’s party on the basis that he is better than the official opposition is in a state of steep moral decline. Why would those who claim a superior level of consciousness encourage citizens to continue to participate in their own dehumanisation? Did citizens’ efforts to improve their lives and the nation’s future abruptly stop on March 28 ,2001, when the Unity Labour Party came to power?

Have we stopped to ask what national hero Chatoyer would think of our complicity in selling off our country’s resources at a fire-sale price and the debasement of our youth, especially young women?  Would Nelly Ebou, the enslaved African heroine, who paid with her life by striking a blow for freedom by killing the white overseer on a Mayreau estate parade in front of Gonsalves, as the present-day sambos do? 

What about Samuel Sherriff Lewis, the leader of the 1935 rebellion who embraced Haile Selassie and celebrated Ethiopia’s crushing defeat of the white Italian invaders, George Mc Intosh, an earlier crusader for the religious rights of black men and women to practise the Shaker religion, or Pappy Joshua, who taught impoverished Black plantation workers that their beauty lies in their appreciation of their somebodiness? Would they remain silent in the face of the dismal conditions in our country? 

Reimagining freedom of necessity commands us to look again at what we hold sacred. Is Gonsalves really the Blackest prime minister in the Caribbean? Was he ever? Is he the most progressive we have ever had? What has his blackness and progressive policies brought us? It is a fact of daily life that post-colonial SVG remains stuck in a colonial mindset. Queen Victoria, who died 124 years ago, still owns the park where our main independence event is commemorated. The main roadway leading out of Kingstown is named after Charles Murray, an arch-reactionary, racist colonial governor. 

Have the government’s policies impacted poverty, unemployment, and crime rates or reduced the depths of helplessness and hopelessness that pervade the land? It’s a fact of life that the improvements witnessed in the last quarter century amount to tinkering at the margin, nothing revolutionary or transformative. All baby steps forward were opportunistically transactional with an eye to vote-grabbing. Is there a single distinctive characteristic that positively sets SVG apart from any other Caribbean country?

The World Bank says the per capita income in SVG in 2023 was US$10,540, which is EC$28,458. Surely, most Vincentians could only dream of making this amount each year. 

The foregoing proves why we cannot buy the thoughtless argument that there is no opposition. To embrace the no-opposition viewpoint is to make ourselves invisible and unworthy. We are the future we have been waiting for. Every serious Vincentian must understand that they are the opposition and commit to ending Gonsalves’ stranglehold on our country. Whenever they come before the next election, eat them out, drink them out, and vote them out.

*Jomo Sanga Thomas is a lawyer, journalist, social commentator and a former Speaker of the House of Assembly in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

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