The International Radio Emergency Support Coalition (IRESC) has said an emphatic no to the nomination of Guyana’s Patrick Gomes for Secretary General of The African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States (ACP) in view of the prorogation of Parliament.
The organisation has also called on all ACP member states to reject Gomes’s nomination as a way of sending a message to the Government of Guyana that “the ACP Group does not support dictatorship.” It has also called for a similar rejection of Trinidad and Tobago’s nominee Dr Hamid A Ghany, who it said, “acted as a dictator in helping the Government of Trinidad and Tobago amend the constitution of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago to introduce run-off elections in the country without consulting the people…”
The IRESC, in a statement issued on Tuesday, said, Gomes and Ghany should be rejected as they would both pose a threat to good governance and democracy for the ACP.
Instead, the IRESC said, it would endorse Patricia R Francis of Jamaica, the third nominee, for the post of Secretary General of the ACP Group. It said Francis was a woman of great fortitude, who would further and bring together the ideals of the ACP Group in dealing and finding solutions for the many problems and challenges it faces, especially in the light of threats of Ebola.
Gomes is Guyana’s Ambassador to the European Union and Belgium. He is also accredited to six other European nations and is the country’s representative to the World Trade Organisation, Food and Agriculture Organisation, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).
Ghany is a senior lecturer and former Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Trinidad. He is also director of the non-profit organisation Principles of Fairness.
Francis chair of Jamaica’s Public Sector Transformation and Modernisation Committee, while also serving on advisory boards of academic institutions such as SciencesPo in Paris and the IESE Business School in Barcelona, as well as board of the Jamaica Producers Group. She is also a member of the Eminent Persons Group for the Commonwealth Secretariat, which made recommendations to heads of state on how to reform the organisation and chair of the drafting committee of the ACP Eminent Persons Group.
The new ACP Secretary General will be appointed during the 100th session of the ACP Council of Ministers on 9 – 12 December 2014 and will take office from March 2015 to March 2020.
The IRESC has consultative status to the United Nations Economic and Social Council. It advocates on humanitarian affairs, indigenous people, international security, justice, media, refugees among other areas.
