All across Caricom, within the physical confines of its geopolitical space and beyond, in the diaspora and the broader sphere of cyberspace, tough, painful questions are being asked of those charged with the region’s collective welfare. So far, few answers have been forthcoming and attention is now turning to the deliberations of Caricom heads at their inter-sessional meeting next week in Grenada. But expectations, based on previous form, are not high.
“Whither Caricom?” asked the Barbados Advocate in an editorial on January 6, 2011, as it went through a veritable litany of the woes bedevilling the regional integration process, ranging from the failure of leaders to address the implementation deficit in the context of the Caricom Single Market and Economy (CSME) to the lack of appetite in some countries for the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) to be the final appellate court for the region in place of the Privy Council.
One day later, the former diplomat and knowledgeable regional commentator, Sir Ronald Sanders, posed the almost comical question, “Caricom or Cari-gone?” in articulating public frustration with the slow pace of integration. As a partial answer, he suggested that the “Caricom vehicle needs an urgent overhaul,” alluding to his own call for “an overall reform” of the activities of the Caricom Secretariat, which would include “a sustained, multi-media campaign throughout the region” on the benefits to the people of the region of membership of Caricom. Indeed, such a campaign is long overdue, given how little people know of the workings of the secretariat, much less the arcane procedures and the precise results of the meetings of heads of government and the various councils of the community.
On January 9, Rickey Singh, the unofficial doyen of Caribbean political analysts, cuttingly asked, “Are the Heads of Government really serious?” in relation to the establishment of a Permanent Committee of Caricom Ambassadors, as a vain attempt to refine the governance structure of the community. Even if the heads will not acknowledge it, what is really needed is not another layer of dysfunctional bureaucracy rooted in “political myopia,” but the political will to cede some aspects of sovereignty to a supranational body with the legal authority to enforce the decisions of the heads.
Mr Singh followed up on this piece with an even more scathing commentary on the “puzzling secrecy” surrounding Caricom’s process to find a new secretary general to succeed Edwin Carrington. To date, there has been no public advertisement for the post, no job description, no publication of terms of reference for or information about the composition of the search committee chaired by the Foreign Minister of Barbados, nor any official report on how the search has been conducted or on its findings. You would be forgiven for thinking that this was a papal election, except that a puff of white smoke is not expected to emanate from Grenada next week.
According to Mr Singh, the search committee has determined that that none of the five candidates put forward by the governments of Belize, Dominica, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines and Suriname have “met the required appointment criteria,” whatever they might be. But in the absence of hard information, Mr Singh is forced to conclude: “The recurring question, therefore, in the face of continuing secrecy over the search committee’s work, is: What’s really going on?”
We may not know what is really going on but most of us would agree that the answer to the bigger question pretty much resembles what Sir Ronald wrote last week: “Caricom needs strong leadership, a new vision and new and relevant priorities in a more dynamic structure. Only the leaders can begin the process of overhauling it for the benefit of the region’s people.”
This would indeed be a good start on the road to regaining Caricom’s lost momentum pinpointed by President Bharrat Jagdeo in his address to the Guyana Defence Force’s annual officers’ conference last month. And in renewing their commitment to regionalism and refocusing their sights on the objectives of regional integration, with a more rational approach to priorities and a greater sense of urgency, heads should know that the appointment of a strong secretary general would be the next logical step.
A more transparent process is therefore called for. The present search committee should either be disbanded or reconfigured to allow for a genuine mix of assessment expertise and sectoral representation, but whatever is decided, its composition should be made public. A job description along with the desired competencies should be published. The post of secretary general should be advertised and a time-frame for applications and selection announced, ideally between the end of the inter-sessional meeting and the beginning of the next meeting of heads in July 2011. The selection process itself should include, as we have previously proposed, the opportunity for the candidates to interact with the regional public and, as the final step, interviews for up to three short-listed candidates with heads. And all this should be without any consideration of nationality, save that candidates should be citizens of member states, gender or age, providing of course that candidates are in reasonably good health. The best man or woman for the job must be found. Four months is, admittedly, not a long time to do so, but it is not too short a period for a more serious and urgent approach to securing the future of the Caribbean Community.
