Giv­en the Cab­i­net ap­point­ments, re­align­ments and reshuf­fles we have wit­nessed in our his­to­ry, one won­ders what is re­quired and what spe­cif­ic cri­te­ria are used to se­lect cit­i­zens for the po­si­tion of min­is­ter or Cab­i­net mem­ber. Though we know that in our West­min­ster sys­tem of pol­i­tics that pre­rog­a­tive is the sole purview of the Prime Min­is­ter to choose his/her Cab­i­net of Min­is­ters, it might be a worth­while act to imag­ine oth­er pos­si­bil­i­ties.

Per­haps, it is time we con­sid­er chang­ing the process of mak­ing Cab­i­net ap­point­ments to be less par­ty-cen­tric to be more com­pe­ten­cy-based and per­sons with proven track records in per­for­mance, or those with pas­sion, dri­ve, and vi­sion, as one does not want to au­to­mat­i­cal­ly ex­clude younger per­sons from ris­ing to such high of­fice. If I were in­vit­ed to form a Cab­i­net of Min­is­ters, the fol­low­ing would be some of the cri­te­ria and qual­i­ties re­quired:

• Per­sons must be pro­fes­sion­al with rel­e­vant train­ing and ex­pe­ri­ence in their field of en­deav­our, with some in­ter­na­tion­al ex­po­sure .

• In­di­vid­u­als who have demon­strat­ed lev­els of em­pa­thy & com­mu­ni­ty in­volve­ment, as well as a demon­strat­ed ad­vo­ca­cy/ac­tivism for peo­ple mat­ters will be high­ly con­sid­ered.

• Peo­ple who have demon­strat­ed ca­pac­i­ty to mo­bilise re­sources and in­spire peo­ple with req­ui­site lead­er­ship skills, and net­work­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties, and who are proven to be ac­tion-ori­ent­ed.

• Peo­ple who are able to dis­agree and pro­vide suf­fi­cient sup­port for their ar­gu­ments based on wis­dom, re­search and ex­pe­ri­ence, and not sim­ply po­lit­i­cal ex­pe­di­en­cy or con­sid­er­a­tions are cer­tain­ly good Cab­i­net choic­es. An in­di­vid­ual ca­pa­ble of pre­sent­ing new ideas and per­spec­tives will be warm­ly en­cour­aged to ap­ply.

Mov­ing for­ward we might con­sid­er open­ing up an ap­pli­ca­tion process for cit­i­zens both here and abroad to sub­mit their CVs for con­sid­er­a­tion for a Cab­i­net po­si­tion, and then we would at­tract the type of ded­i­cat­ed and com­pe­tent per­sons, young or se­nior, who would self­less­ly make the kind of con­tri­bu­tion to our Re­pub­lic to­wards achiev­ing sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment.

Ke­ston Per­ry

Via e-mail