…Caricom must not be scrapped
The latest HoG’s meeting of Caricom set your Eyewitness thinking, like Alfie, on what’s it all about. There ought to be a law on public institutions demanding every five years they justify their existence. If they can’t – then they ought to be disbanded. In effect, they have to show cause why the public should keep shelling out funds to keep them around. Not like how our Government peremptorily shut down Wales, but giving the bureaucrats one year’s notice.
One leader said that Caricom shouldn’t “procrastinate. Caricom not procrastinate? Isn’t that like squaring the circle? To bureaucracies in general, and Caricom in particular, it’s all about showing pushing paper from one tray to another, then one desk to another. As Harvard sociologist Thomas Sowell said, “You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats, procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.” He obviously knows Caricom!
The question for Caricom’s bureaucracy is “what have they done for us, the people of Guyana in that time?” Let’s not get carried away with positions Caricom took at the UN or Brussels or the WTO or all the other junkets these bureaucrats jet off to all year round. In the grand scheme of things, Caricom diplomatic clout isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit. There’s another human liquid effluent that comes to mind – but this is a family newspaper!
What did we get from the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) Caricom signed with the EU? What about that sugar protocol with the EU? Your Eyewitness knows the bureaucrats will whine about how poor and small we are. But that’s the whole point about coming together and having this mega bureaucratic albatross around our necks, isn’t it? Strength in numbers and all that?
But we don’t have to look outside at Caricom’s relations with the outside world to see its ineffectualness. Just look what they’ve done – or more to the point NOT done – on a problem that’s long identified as solvable with our own resources. Every year, starting in 1973 when the organisation was launched, the HoG’s would gather and whinge about us importing US$3 billion worth of foodstuffs. Excepting at the recent meetings – including the present one – the number had grown to US$4 billion!
Back in 2002, then President Jagdeo offered a concrete suggestion – eponymously dubbed the “Jagdeo Initiative on Agriculture” – to solve the problem. There were eight challenges identified that were divvied up between the members. Ours was agricultural land, which we immediately offered for a pittance.
So the Caricom talked and talked – adding to global warming – but, as usual, nothing was done!!
So Caricom – gwan da side!!
…for being in limbo
With the head of GECOM hanging up his abacus and heading to the deep Sargasso Sea – Prezzie asked the Opposition to submit their list to choose the successor. Then, as we know, all hell broke out over – yes! – the meaning of the phrase “fit and proper”. The Trojan War was blamed on Helen; WWI on the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand – but “fit and proper”?? Oi vey!!
So, we had the interminable back and forthing between the President and the Opposition Leader and then their representatives the former and incumbent Attorney Generals. Now, suddenly, we’re informed the process is “limbo”. Your Eyewitness was intrigued. How did things sink to this level? Having being force-fed on Dante in high school, he knew Limbo was the first circle of hell. So, was this a hint that the process was deep-sixed?
Or, is it our “Caribbean Limbo”, where Basil Williams is showing how low he can go?
…for bootstrapping
Your Eyewitness gets it that “self-referentiality” is post-modern and all that. But in asking for powers exceeding that of the judge, jury and executioner, surely Clive Thomas should refer to some other source than himself for his outrageous “$306 billion stolen annually by PPP” claim.
At his age, is he imagining it all?
