THE NEW CHAIRMAN of the Caribbean Community, Prime Minister Dean Barrow, is planning to enhance “the quest by CARICOM for improved living standards and provide a safer, viable and prosperous Community” in 2016.
Good luck, Mr Barrow, as staffers of the Georgetown-based Caribbean Community and others, including the media, continue to battle spreading cynicism against what Trinidadians cynically liken to “spinning top in mud”. Frankly, it has become the norm for successive new chairmen of our 15-member Community to voice pleasant promises that fail to materialise!
This was also the scenario for the immediate past CARICOM chairman over the last six months – Barbados’ Prime Minister Freundel Stuart. He too had passionately assured the last summit, held here last July, that he and his colleagues were vigorously grappling with the challenges to attain major objectives of the region as outlined in plans for the Caricom Single Market and Economy (CSME).
Sadly, this laudable goal continues to be elusive when it comes to delivering on promises. The harsh reality is that in terms of advancing the goals to transform CARICOM into a seamless economy and deepen the overall processes for making the Community into a vibrant single market and economy, there simply has to be collective demonstration of commitment by all Community leaders and their respective administrations to act in unison to implement decisions taken.
Current status quo
The current status quo of recurring frustrations takes just one Community Head of Government to block implementation of a major decision previously taken. Meanwhile piles of relevant reports reflecting the serious inputs from some of this region’s most outstanding economists, social and political scientists, management experts and other scholars are gathering dust amid spreading public disillusionment.
After years of “talk” and more “talk”, our CARICOM leaders are yet to find sufficient reasons to collectively agree on some implementation initiatives in other areas that are even more relevant to make a lived reality of the CSME. The CARICOM leaders haven’t been able to maintain the “CARICOM Parliament’ beyond three meetings in Barbados.
Meanwhile the problem of moving CARICOM towards inauguration of the CSME is being compounded by the apparent lack of interest and vision on the part of the region’s private sector, which occasionally awakes to offer some self-serving observations.
Then there is what was once a militant Caribbean Congress of Labour umbrella body of the region’s trade union organisations. It once had a functioning secretariat based in Barbados.
There remains a need also for the region’s media, in particular those more established ones across CARICOM and linked to the Port of Spain-headquartered One Caribbean Media, to critically review how they could better contribute to the primary objectives of CARICOM in the quest for transformation into a single market and economy.
In his own recent contribution on The OCM Story (published in last Friday’s Nation and Trinidad Express), the well known regional journalist and author Harold Hoyte – one of the directors of the regional media conglomerate – in commenting on “the changing media landscape) made some insightful observations. In particular, in relation to an “enabling role” the media could play by being more helpful in fostering responsibilities ‘as guardians of people’s rights . . .”. We shall see!
• Rickey Singh is a noted Caribbean journalist.