So, our distinguished Minister of Foreign Affairs, Rudy Insanally, has finally called it a day. In his early 70s, clearly tired and regrettably not in the best of health, Mr Insanally has announced his retirement as Foreign Minister, for “personal reasons”, after almost seven years in the job and more than four decades of selfless service to the nation.
Mr Insanally’s retirement comes as no surprise though. Indeed, the only real surprise is that he stayed so long as this country’s top diplomat. Serving in the Cabinet as a technocrat with no political base, he found the Jagdeo administration either unwilling or unable to grant him the resources and latitude necessary to rebuild a Ministry confounded and demoralized by his predecessor.
Mr Insanally, who is generally acknowledged to be the epitome of the consummate diplomat, has visibly aged during his tenure at Takuba Lodge and it would seem to many that his intellectual resources have been stretched and his energy sapped by the challenge of being this Government’s foremost international spokesman. If anything, he may be retiring too late, with his considerable reputation, at home and abroad, having suffered because of his inability to convince the administration of the imperative of arresting the decline of a once proud Ministry, in order to advance a more coherent and results-oriented foreign policy.
It is not really his fault though. Shortly after the PPP/C assumed power in 1992, the party apparatchik and Jagan loyalist, Clement Rohee, was appointed Foreign Minister with a mandate to root out perceived PNC loyalists. Mr Rohee took on his task with unmitigated zeal, putting into practice the revolutionary edict of destroying to rebuild. The former he did quite well. The latter, he realized too late, was a hopeless mission in the degenerating climate of distrust, micro-management and politicization, which resulted in the haemorrhaging of invaluable and irreplaceable skills and experience.
To make matters worse, in a battle for political survival when he was asked to relinquish the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr Rohee managed to secure the creation of a new Ministry of Foreign Trade and International Cooperation, born out of a messy division of the assets of Takuba Lodge. He thus handed over to his successor half a Ministry. Indeed, he did not even have the good grace to give up the Foreign Minister’s office on the fourth floor of the building, relegating Mr Insanally to the office on the second floor formerly occupied by the Ministry’s Head of Administration.
To his credit, Mr Rohee would perform admirably in his new role. On the other hand, the relevance of the Foreign Ministry had once again been grievously diminished by the PPP/C and Mr Insanally’s task was to be all uphill from the outset. There is probably a cruel significance in the fact that his office has never moved from the second floor, even with Mr Rohee’s departure for the Ministry of Home Affairs.
But when President Jagdeo asked Mr Insanally to take over the Foreign Ministry in 2001, there was widespread optimism that a new approach to foreign policy was on the cards. Alas, all the hopes and expectations surrounding Guyana’s most respected diplomat, with years of exemplary service at home, in Washington, Caracas, Brussels and at the UN in New York, where he was even accorded the signal honour of being elected President of the General Assembly on behalf of the Latin American and Caribbean region, have come to naught.
Notwithstanding the successes of the Maritime Boundary Dispute against Suriname and Guyana’s chairmanship of the Rio Group, the fact remains that the Foreign Ministry is still in a parlous state. Key posts remain unfilled and our diplomatic missions are inadequately staffed or ill-equipped for proactive political representation or the type of economic diplomacy required to attract significant foreign investment into the country.
Unfortunately, all the recommendations of Mr Insanally’s senior officers, advisers and consultants, including a study prepared with UN funding conducted by independent, international experts, have come up against the brick wall of the administration’s intransigence. As recommendations, requests and even pleas for action on the three p’s of pay, promotions and postings, have been transmitted from Takuba Lodge over the road to the Office of the President, they have been rejected, rebuffed or simply ignored. So much so that “over the road” has become a euphemism for a combination of the lack of political will and bureaucratic inaction to be found at the highest levels of Government. It is enough to wear down even the hardiest of souls.
But Mr Insanally is not yet over the hill. Intriguingly, he has agreed to serve in some sort of advisory capacity “over the road”,.
Whoever his successor, this nation owes Rudy Insanally a huge vote of thanks for his lifetime of dedicated service. We wish him well in his new capacity.
