A brewing political and media controversy in St. Vincent and the Grenadines erupted this week, as opposition leader Ralph Gonsalves launched a sharp public critique of independent news platform iWitness News during his weekly “Morning Comrade” radio segment on the ruling Unity Labour Party’s (ULP) Star Radio on Monday. At the center of the firestorm is a minor clerical mistake at the state-run Agency for Public Information (API) that opposition figures have framed as a targeted bullying campaign against the agency’s acting head, Nadia Slater. The controversy took a shocking turn early Tuesday, when Slater was reportedly assaulted and injured at her home by an alleged relative, with both she and a 70-year-old aunt hospitalized and a suspect taken into police custody.
The sequence of events began on April 28, when API published an official advisory for a government press conference that incorrectly labeled Gonsalves, former ULP prime minister, as the sitting prime minister — five months after the New Democratic Party (NDP)’s Godwin Friday defeated the ULP in general elections and assumed office. Gonsalves has characterized the mistake as an entirely innocent, unintentional slip, noting similar mislabeling has happened to other senior politicians transitioning out of office. He pointed out that current Deputy Prime Minister St. Clair Leacock and Education Minister Phillips Jackson both accidentally referred to him as prime minister on the floor of parliament after he left office, and that decades ago, voters and politicians continued to call Sir James Mitchell prime minister for a period after he stepped down following 16 and a half years in office. The misstep was compounded when API sent a correction that accidentally swapped a key word, describing the mislabeling as a “genuine error with malicious intent” instead of the intended “without malicious intent.”
iWitness News, a news outlet founded in 2006 by Kenton X. Chance, was among the media organizations that covered the typo incident, and later reported that Slater was placed on administrative leave in the wake of what the outlet called a “comedy of errors.” Citing an anonymous source close to the situation, iWitness News questioned why the five-month-old NDP administration had retained Slater in the acting API director role, noting she had openly campaigned for the ULP during the 2025 general election. The source also added that the previous ULP administration itself passed over Slater three times for the permanent director role, appointing external candidates instead even though she was a known ULP supporter.
During his radio address, Gonsalves argued that political opponents and critical media outlets have blown the minor mistake far out of proportion to harass Slater, framing the sustained scrutiny as a targeted bullying campaign. “It’s not something that you should turn into a matter bigger than it is. The politicians are hounding Nadia. I seeing iWitness News wanting to tie her up, tar and feather her,” Gonsalves told listeners, adding that the swapped word in the correction was itself an obvious secondary typo that is being unfairly exploited. “It can’t be an inadvertent error with malice. It’s clear that’s a typographical mistake, but they’re just stringing it up.”
Beyond the controversy surrounding Slater, Gonsalves also directly questioned the professional ethics of iWitness News founder Kenton X. Chance, who was appointed St. Vincent and the Grenadines Ambassador to Taiwan, with his term officially starting March 1. Gonsalves raised concerns that Chance continues to own and operate the news outlet from overseas while serving as a sitting government diplomat, arguing this dual role creates an unacceptable conflict of interest. Though Gonsalves acknowledged Chance’s appointment as one of the better diplomatic picks the current NDP government has made and said he holds no personal ill will toward Chance, he argued that running a politically aligned news outlet while serving as a serving diplomat is improper. Gonsalves, who has been a frequent critic of iWitness News’s coverage long before Chance’s diplomatic appointment, claimed the outlet has evolved into a de facto partisan mouthpiece for the ruling NDP, and derided it with a opposition-coined pejorative “Lie Witness News.” He accused the outlet of publishing unprofessional, heavily biased content that frames news stories as partisan editorials filtered through skewed perspectives, and said it is leading the charge against Slater.
Chance, for his part, has a long public record of commenting on API’s operations dating back to 2010, and in recent years has criticized the agency for shifting toward competing with rather than collaborating with private media, while branding its own content as “superior journalism.” Notably, Gonsalves himself expressed frequent frustration with API’s functioning during his own time as prime minister. Chance and Slater also share personal history, having attended primary school together as classmates in Clare Valley — where Slater’s family is from — before later working alongside each other in media.
Just hours after Gonsalves’s Monday critique, the controversy shifted dramatically with breaking news that Slater had been assaulted at her home around 3 a.m. Tuesday local time. Police confirmed they have taken a suspect, identified as a relative of Slater, into custody. Both Slater and her 70-year-old aunt, who was also involved in the incident, were transported to a local hospital for medical treatment. Details on the severity of their injuries were not immediately available as of Tuesday morning.