The French-based Kweyol language, grown out of Slavery’s creative mix of African and European tongues, is the most-widely-spoken in the Eastern Caribbean region.
It’s similar to that spoken in Haiti and other Caribbean nations and territories formerly colonized by France, including Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Saint Lucia and Trinidad & Tobago, as well as the French ‘Overseas Departments’ of French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique — and half of Saint Maarten.
This version of Kweyol is also very-much-alive in the Caribbean and African Diaspora, including among persons from former French colonies on the continent.
Its multilingual coinage and acrobatic elasticity therefore allow for creative phrases with multiple possible interpretations, depending on contextual adaptation.
So, with elections on the horizon in Saint Lucia and St. Vincent & The Grenadines, voters actually seem like being prepared for assaults on their good senses by hapless opposition parties offering everything for nothing, when every voter today knows nothing comes for nothing.
From what they say on campaigning platforms, some opposition parties and candidates say and do anything to sound electable, promising the impossible, be it to kill crime or end taxation.
But instead of preparing to hop, skip and jump over voters into office and power, the Caribbean opposition parties preparing for polls would do well to learn some lessons from the recent Guyana presidential elections.
Guyana’s People’s National Congress (PNC) was established by Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham and Saint Lucia’s United Workers Party (UWP) was founded by John George Melvin Compton – both parties taking office in 1964 through post-election marriages of electoral convenience.
Those marriages of convenience altered the final allocation of seats to deprive the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) in Guyana and the Saint Lucia Labour Party (SLP) – Mothers of All Parties in the two countries – from returning to office after winning all elections after the right to vote was introduced (for 1951 elections in Saint Lucia and 1953 in Guyana).
But, 61 years later, the PNC suffered its biggest-blow-ever in 2025 after sitting on its hands and its laurels for five years, seeming to have taken its supporters for granted.
Same in Saint Lucia, where, instead of humbling itself to accepting that it badly lost the 2021 General Elections (with the SLP winning a 15-2 majority), the UWP is behaving like it still hasn’t accepted that sound electoral whipping.
Instead, it’s now promising (yet again) the same old promises its failed to deliver after two terms (2006-2011 and 2016 to 2021).
The UWP has opposed every income-generating measure undertaken by the present Philip J. Pierre administration, now only promising to ‘do better’ and ‘give more’.
PNC supporters were fully aware their party failed to live-up to the task over the last five years and opted to either stay home, or vote elsewhere.
But instead of examining its horns to find-out where and when it all went wrong, PNC Leader, Aubrey Compton Norton, is blaming everyone and everything else than his maximum leadership and its costly miscalculations, his party and its electoral alliance (APNU) ending-up losing two-thirds of its support to a three-month-old party that didn’t even present a manifesto.
Ditto Saint Lucia, where the UWP is clinging to obviously magnified social media images to announce that ‘Hope is finally here’, claiming to have finally discovered ‘Seven Lifelines’ and ‘Seven Solutions’ to ‘Save our Saint Lucia’.
Sounding like playing Lucky 7 with monopoly money, the party now claims it’ll ‘reduce fuel prices in 30 days’, provide ‘health insurance for every Saint Lucian’, pay for ‘Free Education at the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College’, ensure ‘Pensions for all Banana Farmers’ — and ‘Safety Restored’ with ‘Guns Off Our Streets’.
But this is the same party that promised in 2016 to get rid of certain taxes, to run the Citizenship by Investment Program (CIP) transparently and to turn Vieux Fort into a ‘Pearl of the Caribbean’.
But instead, the last UWP administration entered into a nebulous contract to lease one thousand (1,000) acres of prime agricultural land in the island’s south to an Asian property developer with a paper dream, for one dollar per acre — and for almost forever.
The same party also dismantled a $23 million livestock facility funded by Taiwan, to make way for a horse-racing track that’s no more, while the developer sits squarely on a thousand acres of land – with not a pearl in site.
The UWP, in office twice, failed to meet its own deadlines for completing the St. Jude Hospital and the Hewanorra International Airport projects, but is now rushing this government to call elections before their completion.
The same party that always leaves office with Saint Lucia burdened with higher levels of foreign debt after every term, is now saying it’ll find the money (by simply shifting figures) to deliver all its previously failed to.
Saint Lucians have benefited from the present administration’s provision of subsidies for food, fuel and cooking gas, posting successive annual positive growth rates over four years and meeting the needs of the needy, yet are being asked to leave what they’ve lived since 2021 for another bunch of usual empty promises.
Like Guyana’s PPP/Civic, the SLP has also been attracting UWP support, forcing the party’s leadership to engage in desperate attempts to show it has support it simply doesn’t have, fiddling with photos online, while sounding like wanting to dictate national policy from empty opposition benches.
Like Guyanese too, Saint Lucian’s will not bend-over to get kicked in their collective derriere by desperate political footballers who simply refuse to accept they were outplayed and humiliatingly emasculated electorally in 2021 by the same people they again expect to vote against their interests.
It would therefore do well for the UWP and its counterparts in other Caribbean nations preparing for elections to awake from their slumber and start realizing time has changed while they slept.
But will they?
Time will surely show — and tell!