CARIGONE?

Jul 01, 2009 Editorial

Starting tomorrow, and continuing for another four days, the 30th Heads of Government Conference of CARICOM should serve as a bellwether on the issue of our regional integration movement.
Over the past few years, we have grown increasingly critical in this space at the desultory pace (we are interpreting the word “pace” rather broadly) at which the leaders have proceeded with the commitment that they signed on to in Chaguaramas, 36 years ago.
Has CARICOM, in the words of the common man, become CARIGONE?
There should be no confusion about our stance: we hold to the original conception enunciated by the late great Sir William Demas that our coming together is premised on the reality based on our unique history, we were already a community in the truest sense of the word.
He, of course, was referring to the initial grouping of nations that had been ruled by Britain and it is ironic that most of the foot-dragging and recalcitrance towards greater effective union has come not from the later “outside members” such as Suriname or Haiti, but from our “own”.
By and large, we the people of the Anglophone Caribbean eat, speak, relax (think cricket and music), learn, and even swear as one.
Take any of the major metropolitan centres into which we have migrated – neutral grounds so to speak – and one will quickly discover that oneness.
So the question has to be asked, “Why is it that after thirty-six years (with a further six years experience with the Caribbean Free Trade Area – Carifta) we still are adrift separately, like flotsam and jetsam, on the Caribbean Sea?”
The answer, in our estimation, is the nature of our leaders and their obsession with power.
Our leaders, generally, have unfortunately fallen into the “Little Caesar” syndrome. They relish the opportunity to strut on the world stage (such as it is) as “Prime Ministers” and “Presidents”. They jet-off at the drop of a hat to NY to address the UN or one or the other internal conference always going on somewhere.
Never mind that they are bit-players of such insignificance that they are invariable shunted off to inconsequential break-out sessions with other Little Caesars: they are “leaders of countries” and in their own deluded minds probably equate themselves with the leaders of G-8 or G-20.
And that is the essential and deepest irony. If these leaders are obsessed with power, do they not realise that they will be taken much more seriously if they were actually associated with the resources on which real power always rests?
And that as leaders of micro-states they will always be less than even bit-players unless they seize the opportunity presented by CARICOM and agglomerate their resources into a meaningful unit? Some who are jumping from limb to limb – such as Chavez’s ALBA and Manning’s mini-fiefdom with OECS – are only setting themselves up for a fall.
They are only dealing with bigger egos than their own.
Right now the challenge for the leaders, starting tomorrow, is to move beyond “commitments” – which flow fast and furious at these summit talk-shops – and take concrete actions on the Common Single Market and Economy –CSME. All the irritations that have erupted recently – illegal CARICOM immigrants in Barbados, restraints on trade by Trinidad, or refusal to take action on agriculture — are only symptoms of the underlying fear by leaders of losing their “power”. CSME will only become a reality if the Little Caesars heed the message of the West Indian Commission delivered over seventeen years ago. To wit, they must cede some of their so-called “sovereignty” – which they merrily sign away to any country that doles out some handouts – to a governance body of CARICOM, which will then have the wherewithal to move the integration process forward.
Any “commitment” falling short of this necessary threshold action will send the message to all our peoples – loud and clear – that CARICOM is indeed CARIGONE.

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