By Guevara Leacock
On A View from the Outside this week, we turn our attention to the 47th anniversary of independence in St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG), with the view being that independence is not simply about raising a flag or a grand national parade but it is about the business of running the country effectively and forging development.
This week has been a busy socio-political week in SVG. A lot of issues have emerged and some of these issues demonstrate that we are not doing independence well after 47 years.
On Tuesday, Oct. 27, SVG will be 47 years independent from the British Empire. The theme this year is “Hand in Hand, Uplifting Our Nation”. The flag went up at the Financial Complex on Bay Street on Oct. 1. There has since been a National Day of Prayer, a service of thanksgiving and the Sir Dwight Venner Memorial Independence Lecture. The cultural exhibition and food village at Heritage Square runs to the end of the month, and on Tuesday there will be the national parade. Vincentians should enjoy all of it, and we on A View from the Outside wish St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Vincentians at home and abroad a happy independence.
Vincentians everywhere should take a moment on Tuesday to remember what was actually done in 1979. La Soufriere erupted that same year and ruined a great deal of our agriculture. The following year, Hurricane Allen destroyed the banana industry. Milton Cato and the people of that generation took St. Vincent and the Grenadines into independence at a most difficult time in our history, with a small treasury and one export crop. Independence was not handed to SVG on a quiet Sunday afternoon with a cool breeze blowing in the air.
Independence was and is never just about a flag, a national parade and an anthem. Independence is the day-to-day business of running a country. It is collecting the revenue, spending the money you have, building the infrastructure and teaching our children who they are. Independence is about human development. It is also about making sure that nothing of value leaves our hands without Vincentians knowing what was given and what was received.
On Thursday, the prime minister told Vincentians, in Parliament, that of EC$177.7 million committed to SVG under three agreements with the Saudi Fund for Development, the amount actually spent so far is about EC$3.39 million. More than EC$170 million is simply sitting there unused. Two of those agreements were signed on May 26, 2023, and they expire on Dec. 31, which is just 10 weeks away. One agreement for EC$26.9 million was for cultural and artistic hubs at Bellevue, Troumaca and Petit Bodel. The other, EC$16.2 million, was for a health centre at South Rivers. The prime minister indicated the hubs will not be built in time.
This was not money the country borrowed. It was money already given and available for use. Nobody had to raise a tax or sell a piece of land for it. South Rivers still has no health centre. Troumaca, Bellevue and Petit Bordel still have no hubs. Forty-seven years after independence, a sovereign state could not build a health centre and some cultural and artistic hubs in three and a half years with the money already in hand.
The prime minister also told Vincentians, briefly, about his recent trip to Thailand to attend meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. He said SVG intends to introduce a citizenship-by-investment (CBI) programme, designed by a consultancy, possibly launching in the first quarter of 2027. He said there will be heavy due diligence, a central unit and a monitoring role for the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank.
While there are merits to a CBI programme especially given the dire state of the economy of SVG we must not rush the consultation stage. We must be sure that any CBI programme does not make SVG vulnerable to neo-imperialists, neo-colonialists and outright fraudsters and persons involved in serious, organised crime. After 47 years of independence, we must protect our people and our borders at all times.
We on A View from the Outside are not here on independence weekend to tell Vincentians that independence has failed, because it has not.
On the Saudi Fund money issue, it is fair to say that the fund pays contractors directly, so nothing can be drawn until work has actually begun. Those agreements were signed in May 2023 and April 2024, all under the ULP government, and the prime minister told Parliament that when his administration took office all they inherited was thought on plans and papers, with nothing started.
Do you remember how often Vincentians were told under the previous administration that the projects were in the pipeline? A pipeline with nothing moving through it is aspirational. It is truly a shame that three years after the first agreement was signed, nothing has been done.
The prime minister did something on Thursday that deserves acknowledgement and commendation. He came to Parliament, in answer to an opposition question, and put the embarrassing reality on the record himself. He said he is not satisfied and said it will not be business as usual. That is the right instinct, but time will tell. South Rivers still needs a health centre and in ten weeks the EC$43 million dollars to build it will be out of the reach of the government.
Let us shift gears a bit. After 47 years, independence ought to mean that a Vincentian child learns about this country and the world out of books written by a Vincentian. Ask yourself this: when a primary, secondary or post-secondary student sits down to study social studies, history or English literature, whose book is open in front of them? For most of these 47 years, the honest answer has been a book not written by a Vincentian.
This no longer has to be the case. Gwenneth Cambridge, a former education officer who now teaches at Windsor Primary School, has written a whole shelf of books for Vincentian children. There is Dogs Can Be Heroes Too and Mr Snake Goes Ah Calling in her Come Imagine With Me series, written deliberately to fit the Caribbean Primary Exit Assessment. There is Shhh Listen, which teaches our children their soft sounds, and The Cookie Monster, which teaches them about eating properly.
Cecile Harry wrote a book explaining to Vincentian children what it actually means to be independent. Yes, a Vincentian teacher wrote a book for Vincentian children about independence. Adriana King has written Let’s Write!, a book that teaches children literary skills in writing, also suitable for the Caribbean Primary Exit Assessment. Are these books part of our national curriculum in social studies and literacy? How many primary schools have copies of these books?
This very year Ian Randle Publishers published St Vincent and the Grenadines: A General History to the Year 2025, written by three esteemed Vincentian historians, Adrian Fraser, Garrey Dennie and Cleve Scott. It goes back to the people settled on SVG thousands of years before 1492, deals properly with Chatoyer and the resistance of the 1790s, and sets out the true story about the removal of some 5,000 Garifuna to Balliceaux. We on a View from the Outside say that the book is the best publication to have emerged out of SVG in its 47 years of independence. The publisher recommends it for CSEC and CAPE students, yet it is still not on our booklists.
We are not short of writers either. Peggy Carr, the Vincentian journalist and poet who has spent years in Taiwan, published her first novel, Shape of a Warrior, in 2020, after three earlier books. Cecil Browne, who grew up in a village near Georgetown, wrote The Moon is Following Me, short stories about village family life in the 1970s. Dr Nicholette Spring, born in Dickson wrote Growing Up In Vincy, a memoir of a Vincentian childhood, which is the sort of book a Vincentian child should be able to recognise herself in. Alexis Keir, born in England to Vincentian parents who migrated to SVG as a boy, wrote Windward Family, which follows our people out of SVG to England, North America and as far as New Zealand. That book belongs in a Vincentian classroom because it is the story of Vincentian family life.
There is another thing independence ought to have delivered by now. What law in SVG requires members of Parliament to declare what they own? After 47 years, the answer is none. There is no integrity legislation in force in SVG and there is no integrity commission.
It is not that nobody has thought of it. An Integrity in Public Life Bill was drafted in 2004 — 22 years ago. It would have set up a commission of five members, required every Cabinet member, every parliamentary secretary and every member of the House of Assembly to file a declaration of income, assets and liabilities, including those of a spouse and dependent children. It would have required gifts worth more than a thousand dollars received in an official capacity to be reported within 10 days, and carried fines and imprisonment for filing a false declaration or using public office for private gain. It was never passed.
Now think about how much of what has occurred in SVG this year would look different if that law existed. Lands at Chatham Bay sold to a company whose owners nobody has named. Computers wiped at our consulate in New York. The Director of Audit’s reports arriving years behind. An assessment of our state enterprises carried out by two people, which the prime minister himself told Vincentians he had not yet read. More than EC$170 million sitting unspent with nobody obliged to answer for it.
So, as Tuesday approaches, remember nobody is taking our independence, but it seems as if it is still coming. What stands between SVG and a truly independent state is a procurement system that cannot move money, a habit of announcing agreements rather than executing them, a school system that still teaches our children about themselves out of other people’s books, and 47 years without a single law on the statute book requiring the people who spend our money to account for their own. Those are our own to fix, and forty-seven years is long enough to have started.
On Tuesday, when a fellow Vincentian wishes you a happy independence, wish them back. Then ask them whether South Rivers will ever get the health centre the ULP didn’t build. Ask them which law obliges a minister of government to tell Vincentians what he owns, and ask them to name one book by a Vincentian author that is taught in a Vincentian school.
*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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