Gonsalves’ Emancipation Cricket Festival
‘The higher monkey climbs, the more he exposes his naked ass.’ — African proverb
Last Tuesday evening, Gonsalves and his clansmen launched their self-styled Emancipation Cricket Festival. The festival will run over four days. Gonsalves took exception to someone labelling his extravaganza a clown show. The description is apt. He might as well market his most recent high-wire event as “The Great Kishore Shallow High Fall”. It will fail. Citizens should ignore him so that the event flops.
The theme of Gonsalves’ festival, which comes at a significant expense to Vincentian taxpayers, is “Legacy, Unity and Excellence”. Gonsalves is not interested in the proclaimed theme. His primary concern is control and power. Karl Marx famously observed, “History repeats itself first as tragedy and then as a farce.” As to Gonsalves’s rise in Vincentian politics, a case of farce and tragedy fits the bill.
Gonsalves is a fraud. If he had the interest of Caribbean cricket at heart, his “festival” would not be organised in opposition to Cricket West Indies. If unity meant anything more than an empty word, the Vincentian national Dr. Kishore Shallow, president of Cricket West Indies, would be front and centre in organising the event in much the same way Gonsalves bearhugged him in the run-up to the ICC T20 Cricket World Cup last year. But no! This festival is an anti-Kishore show. Look at who Gonsalves praised for doing the heavy lifting for the event, Carlos James, his North Leeward constituency candidate, who Dr. Shallow is poised to trounce at the polls.
He does not want to celebrate our legends. He wants to use them as props. He does not believe in unity; he claims absolute loyalty. Gonsalves has no regard for excellence or independence. His sole desire is to continue his misrule over our land. We must not let him.
An enduring theme of PM Gonsalves is “Labour Love”. One does not have to look far to conclude that the phrase is devoid of real substance and is nothing more than an empty slogan. Truth be told, Gonsalves, more than any other political leader in our history, has repeatedly demonstrated that he cherishes obedient servants and harbours disdain rather than love for people.
Gonsalves’ relentless assault on Dr. Kishore Shallow following his decision to join the opposition New Democratic Party and becoming a candidate in the North Leeward constituency in the impending election is clear proof of his malafides.
Mind you, politics is not kids’ play. There is no easy road to power unless you are well-connected. If you offer yourself as a candidate for a major party, expect to be challenged, cursed and lampooned. With Gonsalves, you only matter to him if you abandon your critical faculties and offer yourself as a useful idiot. I will bet my left hand that Gonsalves does not claim as a friend a single person who does not toady up to him or opposes him politically.
In 1982, when he broke with the United People’s Movement (UPM), he argued that if those whom he abandoned had been thrown into the sea, no one would miss them. Today, most of those persons are jesters in Gonsalves’ court — anyone offering the slightest shade to anything he says or does can anticipate his small-minded, vindictive wrath. Expect to be called a “low-down down dutty dog” or worse.
In the extravagant bid to host games in the 2024 International T20 Cricket Tournament, Dr. Kishore Shallow was fit for purpose. Gonsalves described him as a brilliant young man who was a worthy son of our Vincentian civilisation. Dr. Shallow, we were told, was the right person for the job as president of Cricket West Indies and a man who made us proud.
All of the public praise for Dr. Shallow evaporated after he announced his political allegiance. Immediately, Gonsalves disclosed that he regretted supporting Dr. Shallow’s presidency of Cricket West Indies. He doubled down on the nonsense and argued that cricket administration and electoral politics cannot mix, and Dr. Shallow must choose between cricket and politics. He claimed that under Dr. Shallow’s leadership, West Indies Cricket has sunk to the worst level it has ever been. In light of the West Indies’ humiliating loss to Australia last week, he bellowed that everyone on the board, including Dr. Shallow, should resign.
Absent from the criticism about the decline of West Indies cricket, whose genesis can be traced back to the mid-1990s, is the fact that he, Gonsalves, was the Chair of CARICOM’s Prime Ministerial Sub-Committee (PMSC) on Cricket from 2016 to 2023. If blame is to be cast, Dr. Shallow should be deemed less culpable.
Not in Gonsalves’ world! Dr. Shallow is chastised as aloof, detached and unaccountable. CWI is accused of missing essential dates on the West Indies cricket calendar –the anniversary of when the West Indies Cricket Team were unofficial champions of test cricket following their 2-1 Test defeat of Australia in 1965 and the region’s success in the World Cup cricket in 1975. Gonsalves’ proclamation was nonsensical because in March 2025, Cricket West Indies disclosed that it would bring together the legends of our 1975 triumph and fittingly honour them at a gala event in Barbados.
Puffed up with vain glory, Gonsalves refuses to admit he was wrong. The self-styled inaugural Emancipation Cricket Festival is his reinvigorated stunt to tame or outdo Dr. Shallow. He accused CWI of insulting our legends with the gift of US$10,000 and a plaque. Is he proposing to offer each legend who graces the Arnos Vale Ground a more fitting gift? At what cost to the national purse?!
News broke yesterday that another of Gonsalves’s devious attempts to outmatch Dr. Shallow had flamed out, as the Pete Russell, CPL’s chief executive officer, directed the government to engage Dr. Shallow and the CWIL if it expects their endorsement for the “festival”.
Rather than get in Dr. Shallow’s way, Gonsalves should let the young man soar like an eagle. It is time for Vincentians to bring down the curtains on Gonsalves’s horror show.
