The NDP Made Debt Its Weapon. Now It Is Borrowing Freely and Betting Vincentians Will Not Notice.

The party that told the country debt was proof of failure has quietly taken on US$66.7 million of it. This is not a change of mind. It is a bet that no one was listening.

The New Democratic Party government is now facing a political test of its own making, and it is failing the honesty part of it. After spending years telling Vincentians that the national debt was proof of Unity Labour Party mismanagement, the same NDP administration has quietly confirmed that it has contracted two new loans totaling approximately US$66.7 million since taking office in January 2026. The party that ran against debt is now running on it.

Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Dr. Godwin Friday told Parliament on July 2, 2026, that the government had contracted two facilities. The first is a US$46.7 million Caribbean Development Bank loan to rehabilitate the Canouan Airport. The second is a US$20 million Disaster Risk Management Development Policy Loan from the OPEC Fund for International Development, described as budget support on concessional terms.

So the question writes itself. Was the NDP’s crusade against national debt ever a matter of principle, or was it only ever a matter of convenience, useful in opposition and quietly abandoned the moment the keys to the Treasury changed hands?

A weapon in opposition, an inconvenience in government

For months, the NDP framed the national debt as the signature failure of the ULP. In the 2026 Budget Address, the Friday administration stated that public debt stood at approximately EC$3.5 billion, or 110.3 percent of GDP, at the end of 2025. It said debt servicing was swallowing nearly 40 cents of every dollar of current revenue, and folded the figure into what it called the “dismal state of affairs” inherited from the former administration.

Before that, the official debt bulletin showed total public debt at EC$3.428 billion as of September 30, 2025, comprising EC$3.359 billion in central government debt and EC$68.5 million in public corporation debt. These were the numbers the NDP waved at the electorate as evidence that the country was being run into the ground.

And the party did not merely express concern. It used debt as a cudgel. In August 2025, while still in opposition, St. Clair Leacock said the party would not support a supplementary bill seeking EC$100 million before the election, insisting the ULP would need a fresh mandate to borrow. The money in question was for housing recovery, road rehabilitation and other public works, the very kind of spending the NDP is now financing with loans of its own.

In office, the NDP is doing exactly what it condemned: borrowing to build, to repair and to keep the budget afloat. That is not a scandal. It is what governments do. The scandal is the pretence that it was ever anything else.

This is not a change of mind. It is a bet that no one was listening.

Borrowing was never the real problem, and the NDP knew it

Borrowing itself is not the problem. No serious person believes a small island developing state like St. Vincent and the Grenadines can build airports, ports, hospitals, roads, schools and climate-resilient infrastructure out of pocket. The honest question was never whether a government borrows. It was whether it borrows transparently, and for things that leave the country better off.

That is precisely the argument the ULP made for years, and precisely the argument the NDP refused to accept when it was politically useful to reject it. Former Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves defended much of the debt taken on under his administration as “good debt,” tied to national assets including the Argyle International Airport, hotel development and other investments meant to generate jobs and growth. The NDP mocked that logic. It is now reaching for the same logic to justify its own loans.

You cannot spend a campaign insisting that debt is inherently reckless and then, in government, discover that debt is a responsible tool of development, and expect Vincentians to nod along as though they never heard the first argument.

The loan they attacked, then quietly finished

Consider the Canouan Airport loan. The government says the runway is failing, with cracking, potholes, depressions and weather damage, and that the upgrade will let larger, more modern aircraft land and improve connectivity. Reasonable enough. But Dr. Friday also told Parliament that the negotiations for that loan began under the previous administration and were finalized by his government.

Read that again. The NDP is now claiming credit for completing a financing arrangement that the ULP started, while still using the ULP’s borrowing record as a political weapon. A loan cannot be a wise investment when the NDP signs it and a symbol of recklessness when the ULP negotiated it. It is the same loan. Only the political convenience has changed.

Hiding behind “we inherited it”

The second facility invites the same scrutiny, and here the government will reach for a defence. The US$20 million OPEC Fund loan is not entirely new money. By the government’s own account, it is the repurposing of an earlier US$30 million OPEC Fund loan signed in 2023 to help finance the modern hospital project, which the ULP later restructured when it shifted to separate financing from Taiwan ahead of the elections. The OPEC Fund agreed to convert US$20 million of that sum into the new budget-support loan.

But notice what that admission actually proves. The NDP knew this money was ordinary, legitimate development financing, arranged through a respected multilateral lender on concessional terms. It knew, because it is now leaning on that very fact to explain itself. Yet it spent months telling the public that borrowing of exactly this character was proof of a government out of control. A party cannot shelter behind “we inherited it” today while having branded all of it reckless yesterday. Either the borrowing was defensible all along, in which case the campaign was dishonest, or it was reckless all along, in which case the NDP is now being reckless too. It does not get to have both.

And concessional debt is still debt. A 1.25 percent interest rate and a five-year grace period do not make an obligation disappear. Repayment on that loan begins in 2031. Vincentians will still carry it, whichever party is in office to sign the cheques.

The International Monetary Fund has warned that St. Vincent and the Grenadines remains vulnerable, with public debt rising sharply since 2019 to 113 percent of GDP in 2025, and has projected slower growth in 2026 and 2027. That vulnerability is real. It is also the strongest argument for a government that speaks about debt honestly, rather than one that changes its story depending on which side of the House it sits.

Vincentians are not fools

Here is the part that should sit badly with every voter who believed the campaign. The NDP is not asking Vincentians to accept a difficult truth about the economy. It is asking them to forget. To forget the speeches, the budget rhetoric, the refusal to back borrowing before an election, the framing of debt as the defining sin of the last government. It is governing as though the public has no memory and no capacity to hold two facts side by side.

But Vincentians can hold both. They can accept that a developing nation must borrow to build, and still see plainly that a party which turned debt into its central attack line has no honest way to now borrow US$66.7 million and pretend the contradiction does not exist. Treating the electorate as though it will not notice is not clever politics. It is an insult to the intelligence of the people the government claims to serve.

None of this makes the new loans wrong. It makes the NDP accountable to the standard it invented. If debt was dangerous then, the government must explain why the same debt is prudent now. If borrowing can be justified now, the NDP must stop pretending that everything the ULP borrowed was reckless. And if this really is good debt, the government owes Vincentians more than talking points. It owes them consistency, transparency and proof, and enough respect to assume they were paying attention all along.

Opinion. Vincypowa News covers St. Vincent and the Grenadines and the wider Caribbean.