TRIBUTE TO SIR SHRIDATH RAMPHAL PART 2

By Dr. Livingston Smith

In tribute to Sir Shridath Ramphal who passed recently, I am carrying in three parts the speech he made at the University College of the Cayman Islands, in 2011. The theme of the conference was, ‘Leadership, Governance and Empowerment in the Caribbean.’  Readers will find his ideas as fresh now as when he delivered this provocative address.

In this speech he argued that in the Caribbean, education has long been a key to overcoming social, economic and political disparities but, today, the question arises: Has the passion for education abated, relative to its contribution to welfare? While hard-earned freedom to acquire higher education remains intoxicating, Caribbean leaders must remember their dependence on the technical developments that originate elsewhere. The region’s countries must observe the mandate that sees each promoting learning in its highest form and encouraging creative research; the area must also unite in purpose, in order to achieve meaningful ‘leadership’, ‘governance’, and ‘empowerment’ in the Caribbean. The area needs to promote becoming a globalised society, with members – independent or not – accepting responsibility for contributing to collective regional goals. Civil society is also important in order to emit a Caribbean voice that will be accepted abroad as part of international dialogue; regional work requires an authentic regional identity in order to achieve Caribbean empowerment.

But good governance in the Caribbean cannot be assumed; it must be demanded by civil society and delivered as a national birthright, and promoted at the regional level. The Commonwealth Caribbean is a community of sovereign states that must focus on communal regional needs to avoid falling short in the critical areas of leadership, governance and empowerment. The goal? No more haphazard stumbling as disparate neighbours who look beyond the Caribbean for economic and environmental prosperity. Today, more than ever, there must be greater unity and a focus on establishing a Caribbean Commonwealth through achieving a leading role on the world’s stage.

Second Part of Speech Presented by Sir Shridath Ramphal at UCCI’s Caribbean Conference, March 17, 2011.

It is in this context that I view “leadership” and I choose episodes in Caribbean affairs – contemporary affairs – to explore its quality; perhaps even its reality.

Norman Manley, Michael’s father, might so easily have become the father of the West Indian nation. As it was, when the moment came to lead the nation, political realities at home constrained this great man to stay at home, to decline the mantle of regional leadership and, ultimately, to take Jamaica to a separate independence. The referendum that Manley called to confirm Jamaica’s commitment to federation, and through it to West Indian nationhood, was a wrenching experience for him, as it was to prove to be for all West Indians. What a failure of leadership, and not only by Manley who had called the referendum, but by those, like Adams of Barbados, whose stewardship of the Federation contributed to the “No” vote, and by all beyond, like Williams of Trinidad and Tobago, who could not rise beyond the sham arithmetic that “1 from 10 leaves 0.”

Next year, 2012, the nation of The West Indies would have been celebrating the 50th anniversary of the independence of the Federation. I wonder what would have happened had Jamaica’s referendum gone the other way. What would have happened had the decision -- taken at the 1961 Lancaster House Conference that settled outstanding details of the federal system and fixed the date for the independence of the Federation -- not been frustrated by the “No” vote in that referendum?

Perhaps the forces working for fragmentation would ultimately have destroyed the Federation, even in a post-independence context. We cannot discount it altogether; but, somehow, I doubt that they would have succeeded had the vote in Jamaica been “Yes” and the West Indies become independent as a federal nation on 31 May 1962. I believe with John Mordecai, who chronicled the federal experience, that the tenuous Lancaster House patchwork would have held, that the Federation would have grown stronger, and faith in it firmer, and that, ultimately, Manley’s early vision of a strong West Indian nation would have been fulfilled. Prospects for the Caribbean would now be very different. We have paid a large price for that leadership deficit – for that is what it was.

But the present comes out of the past, and for the West Indies it has had to come out of a rejection of federalism. The present had to be constructed, instead, on a fragile regionalism. Having let federalism slip from our grasp, regionalism became a necessity, and we have spent the last 40-plus years – not always with total conviction – trying to make a virtue of it. That effort has been on the whole a triumph of practicality over inclination, the compulsions of mutual interest in regional co-operation overcoming our natural archipelagic instinct for contrariness and fragmentation. Nowhere were these compulsions more manifest and hints of leadership more promising than at Grand Anse in Grenada in 1989 when, inspired by the vision of Trinidad and Tobago’s then-Prime Minister A.N.R. Robinson, Caribbean political leaders committed themselves to the Caribbean Single Market and Economy and established the West Indian Commission for advancing the goals of the Treaty of Chaguaramas. That was 22 years ago.

At the end of last month, CARICOM Heads of Government met again at Grand Anse. They recognised in their communiqué “their concern at the slow pace of the regional integration movement” and that “the most urgent need was for implementing decisions already made and embodied in the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas, and living by the spirit of unity and collective action that inspired the Grand Anse Declaration which preceded it.”

What had happened, or not happened, in the two decades-plus between Grand Anse 1989 and Grand Anse 2011? Just before the recent meeting, one of the region’s most respected commentators, Sir Ronald Sanders, wrote under the caption, “CARICOM: It’s leadership that’s needed”:

There should be no doubt that the people of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) are well aware that failure of the regional integration project to contribute to solving the urgent problems which now beset their countries is really a failure of leadership.

The CARICOM Communiqué was a virtual confession -- but for that very reason welcome, for it may just signal change. But will it? Sir Ronald ended his commentary with these words:

CARICOM needs strong leadership, a new vision and new and relevant   priorities in a more dynamic structure. Only the leaders can begin the process of overhauling it for the benefit of the region’s people.

I believe this is true and of wide application. And this leadership deficit in the Caribbean cannot be overcome by “people” action – much as we might wish it so! Empowerment in the Caribbean does not justify so large a belief. An empowered civil society does not exist in a practical sense.

What is the record of national or regional civil society within the Caribbean? How large is its mainstream? How activist is it in changing the region? To be fair, in acknowledging a role for it in national and regional affairs, Caribbean governments have given civil society an opening. It does not have to fight that ideological battle, but civil society has to take advantage of that opening before we can talk with credibility about “empowerment.” How much of civil society in the Caribbean has an effective reach? Civil society, I know, has to be narrowly focused because that is how it functions. But if all civil society does is to concentrate on this narrow little area of focus, the danger is that it will miss its goal, because national decision making will call for the exercise of a larger and more diffuse measure of empowerment.

How searching are the roles of consumer associations, for example, in representing civil society at the people level? How active are the trade unions? We can have a discussion on whether or not they are part of civil society – I think they are, and I know some agree, but I am not sure they all acknowledge that they are. How active was civil society in this larger sense in the recent decision-making process on the Economic Partnership Agreement with the European Union ( the EPA), a process that will affect the lives of Caribbean people in profound ways for an immeasurable time? Civil society could hardly claim to have been a vigilant custodian of the rights and interests of the vast majority of the people of the Caribbean. I know there are exceptions, but on this overall experience, we cannot really speak with conviction about an empowered civil society in the Caribbean.

And what about climate change? When the world talks about “climate change” it is talking about our future, not in an indirect way, but very directly. When the world talks of global warming it is talking about hurricanes, about rising sea levels, about storm surges, about the future of tourism – about our future in the Caribbean – about yours in Cayman.

Our professionals are engaged; they have shared the Nobel Peace Prize for their work and that is wonderful. But I am talking of people, of civil society, whose voice needs to be heard.

There are civil society voices in the halls of international dialogue, but they are almost all the voices of developed country NGOs. They do a great job. They have been doing some of our work; but they are not the best people to do our work, because our work needs our hand, our identity, our involvement. It needs to be authentically ours; but we are leaving it to the NGOs of North America and of Europe to march in the streets of Copenhagen or Cancun.

To the extent that we are involved at long range, we tend to buy into the agendas of the north. Many civil society organizations in the Caribbean are actually funded by NGOs in the north. So buying into those agendas is an almost natural thing. But it does not add up to empowerment in the Caribbean.