The APNU+AFC administration envisages that the top diplomatic posts in Guyana’s key overseas missions should be filled by September and Foreign Minister Carl Greenidge says the current dearth of experienced home-grown diplomats means that government will have to look to the diaspora in order to help fashion a Foreign Service capable of executing its foreign policy priorities.
The Granger administration has already made public its intention to replace Heads of Mission deemed to have been political appointees though the limited emergence through the ranks of the Foreign Ministry of Ambassador–rank Foreign Service Officers now limits the ability of the administration to fill top diplomatic posts with home-grown officers.
“We do have a number of Guyanese in international institutions or retired by a system far too early; so that we are looking at a full range of sources on which to draw,” Greenidge told Stabroek News in an exclusive interview on Friday.
Greenidge said that the Foreign Ministry which the current administration has inherited from its predecessor was a far cry from what was once “the best Foreign Service in the Caribbean.” The one-time Finance Minister who has also served in the capacity of a regional diplomat alluded to the need to “re-tool” the Ministry if it is to fulfil what he said was likely to be a “demanding” foreign policy mission.
“The truth is that that this Ministry is not what it used to be. The centre of excellence for political diplomacy is no longer there; and so, in any case, one needs to re-tool…re-tool those who are here. You also need to import skills. The range of skills is far too limited. It’s not only economists; the strength of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was the range of skills that it used to have. We used to have people with engineering degrees, mathematicians, lawyers. Today the range of skills is even more critically important; hence the need for economists in areas like trade, for example. A significant proportion of the negotiators that Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery (CRNM) had—and this was the foremost negotiating machinery in the region—were lawyers. A lot of trade negotiation turns upon legal skills. The range of skills now is far more specific and far more technical than it used to be. We have to train the people who are in the Ministry in the traditional skills like languages. It is a much more demanding regime than it was in the past in terms of the range of skills that we need in areas like the Law of the Sea, for example.”
Long criticised for the practice of ‘banishing’ some officers to overseas posts for several years, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is gearing itself to put an end to that ‘culture’ the new Foreign Minister told Stabroek News. According to Greenidge, the imminent rotation or replacement of Heads of Mission will be accompanied by attention to other staff in the missions “where people might not have had a chance to move in a long time. They may have been in one place for five or ten years. The same applies to staff who are here in Guyana for as many as 12 years and have only served at one Mission. Our rotational arrangements cannot be acceptable if you have the top or people near the top being in one position for 14, 17, 21 years. That isn’t acceptable. After a while you lose those persons. They really become, culturally, citizens of the foreign location; and we have young staff and not so young staff who have a right to expect opportunities to represent their country and find that you have people who have been sitting in the position for 20 years. It can be demoralizing and we have to pay attention to that. If people rotate more frequently there will be less of an incentive to leave. If you believe that having worked in a mission for two years that is the end you are likely to leave, but if they see the opportunity for rotation there might not be such an incentive for them to leave,” Greenidge told Stabroek News.
Guyana’s High Com-missioner in London has been serving since 1993.
Asserting that his own appointment as Foreign Minister was an indication of the direction in which the administration’s foreign policy was headed, Greenidge confirmed that it was his understanding that President David Granger wanted the country’s foreign policy to pay particular attention to the pursuit of economic diplomacy.
“The President himself said that he wants special emphasis paid to economic diplomacy. To that extent that I come with an economic background, an international trade background and an international development background. I think that a number of the priorities… as Chief Planning Officer many years ago I had a central role to play in the establishment of a number of the bilateral commissions like Cuba and the USSR. These were at that time appendages to political diplomacy. Most people would remember me too for the time I spent working on the multilateral agencies—World Bank, IMF and for my work with the Economic Recovery Programme and the renegotiation of our debts. At the ACP group, I was acting Secretary General when the Americans and others took us to WTO (World Trade Organisa-tion) over the banana protocol; so you can take it for granted that I would see the thrust as being wider than the traditional imperatives of foreign policy and in that sense I am quite comfortable with the emphasis that the President wants to place on economic diplomacy,” Greenidge said, though he added that economic diplomacy cannot be pursued in isolation from political diplomacy. “What you can do in any field of diplomacy does not depend on only where you want to go but what is happening in the rest of the world that can derail or redirect where you go. It is in that context that I took on this responsibility,” Greenidge told Stabroek News.
According to Greenidge, the structuring of domestic economic initiatives will have to take account of what is going on in the rest of the world. “If you are looking to increase production—given that we only consume a fraction of what we produce—the international market is important and it is foreign affairs and international trade policy management that are important in creating an environment to make it easier to export to other markets in the region and outside,” Greenidge said.
