Editorial | How to be CARICOM’s boss

A half a year is usually long enough to get a good sense of how someone will perform in a job, including whether the person has it within them to be a transformational leader. Dr Carla Barnett has been the secretary general of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the regional economic group, for six months. The jury, however, is still out on the prospects for her tenure.

For while she has not attacked the job with the obvious gusto and assertiveness which this newspaper believes the circumstances demand, she has not done anything to cause us as yet to lose confidence in her abilities. In fact, she hired some talented staff, whose work, in the appropriate environment, could portend well for CARICOM.

But while we continue to give Dr Barnett the benefit of the doubt, she should be aware that the time is fast passing for her to stamp her authority on the institution, breaking the mould of her recent predecessors, who burrowed too deeply into the shadows of the heads of government, appearing to the public to be petty functionaries executing the basic instructions.

In other words, as we advised when the leaders were searching for a new secretary general, CARICOM needs a top administrator who is willing to take risks, ready to get ahead of the political bosses in the bid to advance the regional integration project.

Opportunity and timing, in this regard, are propitious. Put another way, there has not been in recent times so much energy and seeming commitment, as exists now, to break the implementation logjam within CARICOM and deliver on its promises. The secretary general and her key staff must be major players in this effort.

NEW OPPORTUNITY

The new opportunity is, perversely, a kind of pandemic dividend. COVID-19 pushed CARICOM’s low-growth, high-debt economies to the brink, with the upside of reminding the region of the potential that lies in conglomeration. There has been a renewed, hard and honest look at the community’s failure to follow through on this and the reasons thereby. It helped, too, that Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States highlighted the risks faced by small states standing alone. This has been further illuminated by the global fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

These events influenced two big recent decisions by CARICOM. The potentially most consequential was last week’s move by the heads of government to commit CARICOM to a multitrack path as a way of getting around the community’s implementation deficit. That is, agreements are often solemnly reached at conferences, but founder against domestic political or economic circumstances.

This problem is often exacerbated by how CARICOM takes decisions on big institutional matters. It requires all 15 member states to agree (14 with respect to coordinated economic and trade matters, since The Bahamas does not subscribe to the single-market protocols). Under the reformed system, a handful of members will be allowed to proceed with an initiative once they win the endorsement of two-thirds of the members.

Significantly, unlike what is mostly the norm with CARICOM, this plan was accompanied, simultaneously, by protocols to amend the unanimity rule.

Second, for decades, going back to the 1970s, CARICOM has floated plans for regional food security. These projects were not seriously advanced. A new and seemingly practical initiative is not only on the table, but is expected to be driven by public-private partnerships. An investment conference around the idea is scheduled for Guyana in May. At the same time, a committee of regional honchos, chaired by Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, is reviewing a range of ideas and projects for regional implementation.

TWO MAIN FACTORS

There are, however, two factors to note with respect to this re-energised CARICOM. One is that good ideas and their declarations are not material things. Ideas have to be taken from plans to projects, then implemented. So far we have had words.

The second, and more critical, matter is that, faced with crises and turbulence at home, the priorities of national leaders turn to domestic concerns, away from supranational initiatives, whose benefits may materialise over the longer run.

It is against this backdrop that an assertive, risk-taking secretary general, utilising the available public platform, in addition to behind-the-scenes cajoling, can keep the regional agenda in clear regional focus, while placing moral pressure on the leaders to follow through on their agreements.

In this case, the secretary general is Dr Barnett. She must take the regional publics into her confidence, which at times means talking over the heads of the politicians. It also means making background and policy documents more readily available, allowing for inclusive discourse on regional matters. There is no reason why almost every CARICOM document is classified. That must end.

Hopefully, it is partly to keep on this type of track that Dr Barnett appointed Dr Tres-Ann Kremer, a young Jamaican, University of the West Indies academic and former Commonwealth Secretariat staffer, as her chief of staff. Dr Kremer would do well to advise her boss to proceed on the course we have set, approach the job as though she is in for a single term, and be prepared to be fired at any time.

Simply: Dr Barnett has to reinterpret the job of CARICOM secretary general.