It ought to have come as no surprise that the APNU-AFC administration has taken this long to announce the names of its heads of mission – ambassadors and high commissioners – to those countries with which Guyana has resident diplomatic relations, even though the very names that were eventually made public last week were being bandied about for many months.
It is the custom, of course, that high level diplomatic postings must first engage the studied attention of the President and must meet with his approval. More than that, filling openings at ambassadorial level would usually take a while if only for the reason that, invariably, once there is regime change, all of the heads of mission are replaced and that can sometimes be a somewhat protracted process.
The changing of the guard at ambassadorial level frequently gives rise to scrutiny and comment amongst a certain interest group comprising staff of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs located both at home and in diplomatic missions abroad, as well as watchers of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The scrutiny is usually attended by exhaustive comment on the bona fides of the new appointees in relation to their qualifications and suitability for preferment. The point should be made, of course, that the selection of heads of mission has always been a matter of political choice. However otherwise qualified you are, if you are not politically favoured you will almost certainly not get the job.
Arguably, that situation applies much more these days – over the last thirty years or so – during which the Foreign Ministry has had to cede even more authority to what used to be the Office of the President and what is now the Ministry of the Presidency in matters pertaining to both substantive foreign policy issues as well as operational and administrative considerations in relation to the running of the foreign service. For instance, for almost the entire tenure of the previous administration in office many if not most of the decisions relating to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were widely believed to have been either made or significantly influenced by the Head of the Presidential Secretariat.
As far as these recent appointments are concerned, they say much about the state of affairs in the Foreign Ministry as a whole, the most telling point here being that even allowing for the fact that preferment at the level of ambassador is the prerogative of the President, there used to be a time, perhaps a quarter of a century ago, where at least a few ambassadorial appointments would come from officers who had worked their way through the ranks of the ministry and had proved themselves worthy of promotion to that level.
The fact that the current list of key ambassadorial nominees does not include what one might call any careerists in the Foreign Ministry, that is, if one excludes the long-retired envoys nominated for Caracas and Brussels, confirms much that has been said over the years about the inability of Takuba Lodge to create and sustain clear career paths within the ministry; and whereas in the case of Caracas the circumstance of Guyana’s current relations with Venezuela certainly necessitated the posting of an experienced head of mission, that does not excuse the fact that there does not appear to be anyone from the ranks of current serving foreign service officers who is anywhere near sufficiently equipped to serve as head of mission in Caracas.
The problem of what is, at this time, a foreign service that appears not to be particularly geared for what one might call professional continuity, stems from the fact that the considerations that one associates with that continuity have become increasingly supplanted by political ones in the selection of ambassadors. It appears that little if any attention is being paid to those planning, organizational and training requisites that lend themselves to professional continuity within the ministry itself.
Needless to say this state of affairs has resulted in a condition of unending dissatisfaction and frustration inside the Foreign Ministry, particularly among up and coming foreign service officers. For young, qualified, career-oriented Guyanese, part of the attraction of joining the Foreign Ministry reposes in the prospect of serving Guyana in a foreign capital, particularly in capitals that also offer opportunities for personal and family advancement. There is nothing wrong with that. On the whole, career choices are usually based, in large measure, on considerations of personal and family advancement; it is mostly for this reason that the issue of overseas postings has long been the subject of controversy amongst foreign service officers many of whom spend much of their time contemplating a posting as part of their foreign service experience and in instances becoming fretful when ‘outsiders,’ some well below the level of ambassador, turn up in missions bearing credentials that are purely political.
The fact that it is difficult to think of too many Guyana foreign service officers who, over the past twenty-five years, having worked from ground up in the system have been appointed head of mission raises pertinent questions about the wisdom of anticipating a meaningful career in the Guyana Foreign Service. More than that, in circumstances where, increasingly, the well-being of Guyana, in both political and economic terms, depends on the quality of our bilateral and multilateral relationships and the effectiveness of our diplomatic lobbying efforts at the levels of both foreign capitals and international organizations, we would do well to begin to create a structure underpinned by training and posting policies that point more directly at the building of a professional foreign service. That of course, would require, a priori, a political understanding that acknowledges that the creation of a genuinely professional foreign service transcends the counterproductive divisiveness of partisanship.
