-steps down as SG for the Group of States after five years

THE five-year tenure of Guyanese Dr Patrick Ignatius Gomes, who served as Secretary-General of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group of States, from March 1, 2015, has ended.

He was succeeded by Secretary-General, Georges Rebelo Pinto Chikoti, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Angola to the Kingdom of Belgium, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, and Head of Mission to the European Union, who assumed office on March 1, 2020.

On Friday, February 28, 2020, the Committee of Ambassadors (CoA) of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group of States bade farewell to the outgoing Secretary-General Dr Gomes , according to a release from the ACP.
The senior management team that comprised the Assistant Secretaries-General and the Chef de Cabinet, also demitted office.

During his tenure, the outgoing secretary-general represented the Caribbean Region in the rotational system by which the Secretary-General of the ACP Group is selected every five years. He took the reins of the ACP at a crucial time in the history of the ACP Group of States, which included most notably, the winding down of the 20-year Cotonou Agreement and subsequent activities related to the ongoing post-Cotonou negotiations, the release added.

Another very notable feature of the SG’s tenure was the revision of the ACP’s Constitutive Act, the Georgetown Agreement, which was endorsed at the Ninth ACP Summit of Heads of State and Government in Nairobi, Kenya, in December 2019. The revised agreement will come into force as soon as it has been signed by the requisite number of ACP member states.

Alluding to Dr Gomes’ inaugural address to the CoA, the release said he had pledged to facilitate “diversified partnerships across the Global South by 2020.” In this regard, he looks back on the signing of the Headquarters Agreement for the ACP Information Centre for South-South and Triangular Cooperation — the first such centre to be established in an ACP region — in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea in 2019. Also, the ongoing partnerships with non-traditional partners such as India and Peru, who were both present at the recent symposium on South-South and Triangular Cooperation which was held at the ACP secretariat.

Key to creating “the ACP We Want,” as per the Sipopo Declaration following the Eighth Summit of ACP Heads of State, was the creation of a fund to ensure the long-term financial sustainability of the ACP Group. This fund, the ACP Endowment Trust Fund (ETF), was officially launched by ACP Heads of State at the Ninth Summit. Following the meeting of the Ambassadorial Task Force in February 2020, plans for the operationalisation of the fund will soon be rolled out, the release stated.