Orin Gor­don

The “heads on­ly” What­sApp mes­sage from Cari­com Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al Dr Car­la Bar­nett to Trinidad and To­ba­go’s For­eign and Cari­com Af­fairs Min­is­ter Sean Sobers is an elec­tron­ic in­dict­ment of the process sur­round­ing the heads’ de­ci­sion at their Nevis re­treat in Feb­ru­ary to af­firm a sec­ond term for her. Bar­nett’s cur­rent one ends in Au­gust.

T&T Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar has grounds for ques­tion­ing Sobers’ ex­clu­sion. The prob­lem is the to­tal lack of mea­sured­ness which char­ac­teris­es too many of her ut­ter­ances. Cari­com Chair­man Dr Ter­rance Drew – the Prime Min­is­ter of St Kitts and Nevis – had ex­haus­tive­ly doc­u­ment­ed the cor­re­spon­dence lead­ing up to the sum­mit, to show that he’d spent months keep­ing T&T in the loop on the whole agen­da, in­clud­ing the SG’s tenure.

The lead­ers who skipped the vir­tu­al emer­gency meet­ing Drew called on April 10 to re­solve the dis­agree­ment in­clude the T&T PM, and Guyana’s Pres­i­dent, Dr Ir­faan Ali. Ali was en­gag­ing the T&T Cham­ber of Com­merce at the Hy­att Re­gency in Port-of-Spain at the time. T&T of­fered no rea­son for Per­sad-Bisses­sar’s non-par­tic­i­pa­tion in a meet­ing called to re­solve her own ob­jec­tions to the process.

A do-over seems in­evitable. The trig­ger for that ought to be an an­nounce­ment from SG Bar­nett that she is with­draw­ing from serv­ing an­oth­er term when the cur­rent one ends. Her re-elec­tion has been of­fi­cial­ly af­firmed by Cari­com, so it would ef­fec­tive­ly be a res­ig­na­tion. The cir­cum­stances are too con­tentious for her to go on. Cari­com has a du­ty to en­sure that im­por­tant out­comes don’t rest on pro­ce­dures that raise ques­tions. A sweet­ened ex­it pack­age should ac­com­pa­ny the SG’s de­par­ture at term end.

Bar­nett’s re­la­tion­ship with T&T, a key mem­ber of Cari­com, is un­work­able. More­over, with T&T threat­en­ing to re­strict their fund­ing and their pres­ence at Cari­com meet­ings she’d have to nav­i­gate too much in­sti­tu­tion­al up­heaval. You can ar­gue about whether that’s fair and that it would be tough on her, but the wider in­ter­ests of Cari­com comi­ty may dic­tate that she does so.

The What­sApp mes­sage to Sobers doesn’t re­flect well on Cari­com or T&T. Sev­er­al things can si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly be true. One, that Cari­com plan­ners erred in telling Sobers that he couldn’t at­tend. Two, Sobers seemed at sea about how Cari­com op­er­ates, with the re­sult that, (three) T&T has to share the blame for not be­ing rep­re­sent­ed at the meet­ing. Four, the T&T Prime Min­is­ter’s lit­i­ga­tion of the is­sue has been un­nec­es­sar­i­ly vi­tu­per­a­tive. “Odi­ous” and a “cor­rupt back­room op­er­a­tion” are how she de­scribed Cari­com’s work­ings. Com­plete­ly over-the-top.

The con­tentious What­sApp mes­sage stat­ed that “heads on­ly” was the pref­er­ence of the chair­man. And yet, the chair­man doesn’t get to re­make es­tab­lished and cod­i­fied pro­ce­dures. He him­self seemed to lack pro­ce­dur­al un­der­stand­ing. If any of­fi­cial in the chain ques­tioned him on his ex­clu­sions, we don’t know. A meet­ing of for­eign min­is­ters was si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly set for St Kitts, and the stat­ed need for them (Sobers in­clud­ed) to be at that one was af­firmed by none oth­er than St Kitts and Nevis For­eign Min­is­ter Dr Den­zil Dou­glas, who al­so served the longest as prime min­is­ter. The dis­cord is mad­den­ing when you con­sid­er the wealth of in­sti­tu­tion­al knowl­edge that was present.

For Sobers’s part, no pub­lic of­fi­cial who un­der­stands the work­ings of key or­gan­i­sa­tions un­der his re­mit gets locked out of a room they should be in. He shouldn’t even have had to check if he should be there. Did he push back? Did he try to reach his PM? I asked T&T’s Am­bas­sador to Cari­com Ralph Ma­haraj by What­sApp yes­ter­day: “Were you with Sean Sobers when the ‘heads on­ly’ What­sApp text mes­sage was re­layed to him? And did you ad­vise that as the head of del­e­ga­tion in the ab­sence of the PM, he had the right to be in the room un­der the rules?”

Up to my dead­line, I hadn’t re­ceived an an­swer from Ralph, whom I get along with. The busi­ness of the SG’s term should have been a sep­a­rate line item, but it was ob­vi­ous from the cor­re­spon­dence that the is­sue was go­ing to be con­sid­ered at the re­treat. It wasn’t “sur­rep­ti­tious” at all.

The ef­fort the PM ex­pend­ed on mak­ing sure that she was in the room is in in­verse pro­por­tion to her vig­or­ous ob­jec­tions to what went on in it. T&T and Cari­com both own this.