Action on cricket will come ahead of ‘integration headaches’
THE CENTRAL message from the just-concluded CARICOM Summit in Suriname is an assurance that the long recognised and recommended overhaul of the Community Secretariat should soon get underway. But there is a caveat. It may take at least another five years for a new “strategic plan”, that embodies management reform and implementation processes to unfold with the hope of arresting current pessimism and cynicism over the future of the 38-year-old economic integration movement.
The envisaged “change process” in the restructuring and functioning of the Secretariat is to be subjected to the “oversight” of the CARICOM Bureau, the so-called management committee of Heads that meet between regular annual summits and inter-sessional meetings.
Governance of West Indies cricket and the elusive restructuring of the Georgetown-based Secretariat were two of the major agenda issues to prominently feature in a five-page communiqué on the two-day 23rd Inter-Sessional meeting of CARICOM leaders that concluded in the Surinamese capital, Paramaribo on Friday.

Cricket: As far as the recurring controversies over the central management of West Indies cricket is concerned, the Community leaders decided to have an “urgent meeting” between the Prime Ministerial Sub-committee on Cricket (currently chaired by Antigua and Barbuda’s Baldwin Spencer) and the West Indies Cricket Board(WICB).
A core issue for discussion would be to ascertain precisely actions—if any—have been taken on the far-reaching recommendations of the 2007 Report on “Governance of West Indies Cricket” that resulted from a team of outstanding regional personalities under the chairmanship of Jamaica’s retired Prime Minister, P J Patterson.
That decision came after a collective rebuke of the WICB’s recent personal public criticisms against Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller. It had followed her own criticisms of the Board’s decision to exclude Jamaica from any of the scheduled matches for the coming Australia tour, as well as a seeming unwillingness to resolve the old controversy over Chris Gayle’s suspension from playing for the West Indies team.
The leaders also rallied their collective solidarity behind the Jamaican Prime Minister, Simpson-Miller in expressing their displeasure over what they regard as “insensitive and out-of-order disappointing” remarks from the WICB against her.

Crime and Security: A regular agenda issue, the communiqué offered no new announcements on strategies to be pursued but revealed that they discussed “current trends in criminal activity, including the international dimension and new and emerging threats to security in the region, and agreed on the need for closer working relations with the (relevant) regional institutions…”

CLICO/BAICO: The leaders explained that they had “previously recognized the systemic risk” to the regional financial system and deemed the collapse of the Colonial Life Insurance Company and its subsidiary British-American Insurance Company in the Eastern  Caribbean as “a regional problem which required  a regional resolution…”
The region’s Central Bank Governors have been requested to provide “an early report” on the stability of the financial system in the Community, along with “appropriate measures to enhance the regulation and monitoring of financial entities which operate across border…”