Last week, in commenting on the surprise appointment of Carolyn Rodrigues as Guyana’s new Foreign Minister, we raised more questions than answers about whether she would succeed in reviving the ministry and bolstering the country’s faltering image abroad. But we also stated that Ms Rodrigues should be given the benefit of the doubt.
This week, in a good faith attempt to offer the new Foreign Minister some constructive advice, we have dropped the question mark from the title of our editorial, as we believe that the portents for change at Takuba Lodge are good.
It appears that Ms Rodrigues has hit the ground running and has met with her long-serving and able Director General and the Directors of her ministry, to elicit their initial views on what needs fixing in the ministry. It would also appear that she is under no illusions about the enormity of the task that lies ahead. There are therefore grounds for optimism that she is prepared to bring her obvious intelligence and personal energy to bear, in a serious attempt to succeed in this most distinguished and unforgiving of ministerial portfolios.
Ms Rodrigues obviously has an uphill task ahead of her and she will need all the help she can get. Of course, she may already find herself assailed by all sorts of advice from all sorts of interested parties, this newspaper included, and the first test of her stewardship at Takuba Lodge may well be her ability to discern good advice from bad. The second test will be her capacity to act on good advice and to show results.
Apart from all the background reading that the new Foreign Minister will have already begun, one of her first bits of required reading, in the unlikely event that she has not yet been provided with it, should be the April 2003 report of the United Nations Advisory Mission on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This is, of course, the study that objectively diagnosed the woes afflicting the ministry and suggested that it was not fit for purpose. That is, it could not discharge routine activities or exploit opportunities to contribute to Guyana’s national prosperity, given its outdated structure, operational constraints and diminished capacity.
The report did prescribe a number of reasonable recommendations, but little action was taken, even though the then foreign minister, Rudy Insanally, subsequently commissioned the preparation of a strategic plan by one of his predecessors, Rashleigh Jackson.
It will now be up to Ms Rodrigues and her senior staff to dust off the UN report and revisit its recommendations and Mr Jackson’s, as early in her tenure as possible. They will obviously have to do some prioritizing, given the existing financial and political constraints, and they will have to determine the objectives to be pursued in a strategic manner over the short, medium and long terms. In this regard, they would do well to be guided by the maxim of foreign policy analyst and former ambassador, Ronald Austin, who wrote in the Guyana Review in September 2007 that “an effective foreign policy of a small state must be founded on a well-honed institutional structure”.
Ms Rodrigues and her team will no doubt come up with their own strategic plan and it is to be hoped that a primary focus will be on rebuilding the human resources and restoring the morale of the foreign ministry. At the same time, they must develop recommendations on how to convince the President and the rest of the Cabinet of the invaluable importance of an integrated and coherent foreign policy in the framework of our national development, with the overarching goals of preserving our territorial integrity, advancing our economic interests and, in the current national and regional contexts, guaranteeing the security of our citizens.
It would also help if, at the appropriate time, after settling into her new job, the minister could share with the nation her vision of Guyana’s foreign policy and a statement of intent, as it were, which could, in Mr Austin’s words, “secure bipartisan support and… be implemented by a corps of intelligent and committed diplomats”.
The whole process will require time, patience, understanding and money. In the meantime, Ms Rodrigues will have to show that she is ready to take charge, able to think strategically and willing to fight for her ministry to be allowed to deliver in the national interest.
We continue to wish her well.
