No Guyanese envoy will remain head of the same mission for more than three years, according to President David Granger.
“Rotation of diplomats is of paramount importance [since] if a diplomat is kept in his or her position for too long they lose their effectiveness,” Granger said, when asked during the recording of last week’s edition of The Public Interest interview programme whether his government will be rotating heads of missions, in light of criticism that they remained for the most part static under the previous administration.
He explained that as a consequence, his government is “looking to ensure that there is a system in place to ensure people would not spend more than about three years in one position.”
Granger also noted that each head of mission will be understudied by professional Foreign Service Officers, so that in the fullness of time a purely professional Foreign Service will be recreated.
“This is what we’re aiming at and I am very confident that we will be able to achieve the goal of having a professional Foreign Service within three to five years,” he said, while adding that the last administration inherited a corps of qualified diplomats, whom it replaced with political appointees.
These appointees, according to the president, held these positions sometimes for 20 years though they did not have the same grasp of foreign policy that their predecessors did.
“You cannot appoint a person to a high diplomatic position without allowing that person to understand what international diplomacy is all about,” the President stated
