Jagdeo not interested in Caricom SG post

The Jamaica Gleaner has nominated President Bharrat Jagdeo to be the next Caricom Secretary General, but he has said he is not interested in the post.

Caricom has been searching for a replacement for the former Caricom Secretary General Sir Edwin Carrington, who demitted office last year. At their recent retreat in Guyana, the Caricom heads said that, having received a report from the search committee which they had established to identify a new secretary general, they agreed that the persons short- listed for the position would be subjected to further processes, with a view to taking a final decision by July 2011.

In its editorial on Tuesday, the Jamaica Gleaner recognised the contributions of President Jagdeo, and recommended him to head Caricom, the regional organisation that seems to be losing traction with the Caribbean community.

The newspaper said it feels President Jagdeo is fit for the post, given his immense political background and success at various projects for his own country.

“Our choice for the post is Mr Bharrat Jagdeo, who will leave his job as president of Guyana in August after a dozen years. Mr Jagdeo knows his own mind, can talk frankly to the heads of government, and has a strong sense of what is important for the advance of the regional integration project. And there is precedent in the EU of choosing former political leaders to lead the community,” the paper said.

This was just a day after the Jamaica Observer released a report stating that Jamaicans could care less for Caricom.

In refusing the post, Jagdeo said he would still be available to give advice and assist in making the regional body successful. “I am not interested in the post of secretary general… [but] I would always be available to help out,” the president said.

The Gleaner said that much of what emerged from last month’s retreat in Guyana was, as usual, imprecise and opaque.

“What was clear, however, is that the heads of government believe, with some justification, that there is a need for talking up what has been achieved by the community, while putting on hold the additional steps necessary to establish a genuine single market and economy, such as the creation of a single currency”.

In essence, the leaders, in their ‘diplo-waffle’, conceded what we all know: Caribbean governments have been bad at fulfilling the obligations they set themselves.” Tillman Thomas, the Grenadian prime minister, calls it an “implementation deficit”, the result of an absence of the legal basis for decisions of the conference (of heads of government), supplemented by an institutional machinery with the requisite legal authority.