CARICOM@50 put down a culture jam with Dirty Lyrics that held primetime media spotlight for its just-concluded biannual meeting.
Tossed into the first four minutes – the attention span of new media piranha culture – of the welcome speech by host and CARICOM Chair, President of Guyana Dr Mohamed Irfaan Ali, dirty lyrics proved to be succinct media bait. It turned the spotlight on social and cultural contamination effected by invading alien cultural forces.
Data-packed on culture of governance
President Ali’s more significant use of the platform for data-packed unravelling of deeply entrenched cultural challenges facing CARICOM and stirring appeal to fellow members and partners – for transparency and accountability in governance and business practice was relegated to the shadows. The deeper and broader message and mission was further drowned-out by the electric cultural renderings of a diverse ensemble of the Caribbean’s talk-drummers and a repertoire of folk performances whose own messages of our struggles for self-articulation and self actualisation were buried in the seductive cultural rhythms.
In a data-driven world, the Caribbean’s opaque political culture, embedded as standard practice that lack accountability, has been the bane of its progress. Such an opaque culture of governance – read lack of transparency – frown on knowledge, information and data and latch onto propaganda and hype.
Unprecedented Presidential Post-Truths
So, admittedly, I almost fell-off my chair at the CARICOM Chair’s unprecedented presidential stance for full disclosure and the accountability gaps in his emphatic revelation that 113 pages of CARICOM’s commitments to its primary mandate – a Common Single Market Economy (CSME) – remain unimplemented. It was delivered in the 34th minute of his 36-minute speech at the gala opening of CARICOM’s first 2024 biannual meet, far beyond the attention span of social media sound bytes and yes, I was still awake, alert!
Seasoned in the mechanisms of multilateral meetings, for me the President’s announcement resonated like dirty lyrics spotlighting an murky governance culture, seeping out across the Caribbean Sea like the Tobago oil spill, core to the democratic deficit that is choking the region’s path to development.
See Video revelation of CARICOM’s missing mandates on CSME here:
Cultures of Practice versus Cultural Performance
Delivered with casual good humour, peppered with picong – as a ‘serious’ not a ‘soft issue’- by a host who ditched the formal Euro-styled suit for a lighter modified Castroesque shirt-jack, the message of the CARICOM Chair is already fading from the focus it deserves, drowned out,too, by the very culture it seeks to enhance as the succinct drumming of the CARICOM ensemble of the region’s diverse forms of expression through percussion.
It evoked for me the decades in which I have been dodging bullets, literally and figuratively, by those opposed to any championing of transparency and accountability in governance and indeed any effort to transform such cultures of governance by using data and information to guide policy and planning actions.
Drop in the Ocean of Unfulfilled Commitments
In fact, the 113 pages representing the dirty lyrics of unfulfilled commitments made by governments to bring into effect the CSME floated by CARICOM’s Chair, are a drop in the ocean of now more than a thousand of unfulfilled regional and international mandates and commitments that Caribbean Governments have made at various foreign trips and travels across the Americas, Commonwealth and UN systems, awaiting action to advance in all spheres of democratic governance. (I will release posts related to this subsequently – subscribe to stay informed)
Understanding the trend towards data evidence, transitioning from journalism to new media communications for development and straddling the spheres of researcher and communications specialist, I engaged with civil society and community groups across the InterAmerican and Commonwealth systems to refine the methodology, tools and techniques of data gathering and assessment of governments’ actions on democratic mandates.
Networking with dozens of grassroots civic and cultural groups and intergovernmental organisations we thoroughly and carefully researched, compiled, indexed, analysed, cross checked and scrutinised for local and regional relevance the thousands of mandates and commitments made.
Culturally Relevant Tools, Techniques & Methodologies
We developed relevant tools and techniques to produce the indices of government compliance and benchmarks for Governments’ performance on commitments made. It was hoped that with such data, Governments would move towards targeted actions to fill the gaps that inhibit social and cultural transformation.
Our focus was primarily four areas – the commitments to Freedom of Expression, Access to information, Reform of Local Government process and Citizen Participation, all with engendered perspectives to assess the degree of engagement of women. For this I also coordinated the release, dissemination and engagement of media and other relevant social groups and partners.
We tabulated the data to allow for regional comparison and disseminated for understanding of the gaps that need to be covered.
The startling results showed that on more than 60 percent of such commitments, governments had taken no action! That percentage of inertia would increase significantly if we were to take into account those on which actions were started, aborted, abandoned, neglected, forgotten! And of course, in most areas engagement of women was minimal.
Extended reach for implementation and action
Over the past two decades, I extended the reach to work with groups and organisations and the myriad largely marginalised cultural communities of the Caribbean, Latin America and the global South, to enhance capacities to implement such agenda mandates. The sad reality is that even when such capacity building exercises included policy makers as the one for cultural policy makers of the region held in Grenada, or a similar one for regional youths, firing them up to take action, on their return with action agendas to transform their local and national spaces they were invariably faced with solid walls of indifference of bureaucracies and governance systems and an abyss of inertia, inaction, dependency and disempowerment!
Attack the Messenger!
The immediate, and indeed the long term backlash was to attack the messenger. After the significant amount of expert time and energies voluntarily provided, our information was treated as dirty lyrics.
When a data conscious environment would have latched on to the relevance and importance of the exercise, its outputs to inform outcomes and advance the regional democratic machinery, it was relegated to the shadows in development planning and actions.
They now sit with the 113 unfulfilled CARICOM CSME mandates as the startling data evidence of CARICOM’s democratic deficit – that is, its failure to meet its mandate and its commitment to peoples of the region in a high wall of missed opportunities for development actions, part of the backlog that has holed CARICOM into inertia and saddled it with an image of incompetence and ineffectiveness.
Regional governments continue to pile up unfulfilled commitments signed at international meetings, so add the 113 pages of CARICOM inaction on CSMES to that!
Revisiting the experience
Reflecting on that experience, nothing, not even my background as a hot topics investigative journalist had prepared me for the backlash and persecution that followed – the active target of wielders and dealers of power to discredit the facts is the stuff of political campaigns, not development action!
It included blocking opportunities for us to earn viable livelihood, intimidation on our way to international meetings, active attempts to hack and jack online channels, restrict access to visas by some as the representatives from Venezuela.
Our work at building using data-driven awareness and educating citizens on rights and responsibilities of themselves and what they should expect of their governments did not sit well with Governments. That we had undertaken to count the mandates, itemise and assess what progress was made and which areas were successful, which lagging were dirty lyrics to their sanitised and sanctified massadoms
World of Data for Transformation
In the world of data for development, leaders and administrators would have ceased on the availability to access and use such statistics to improve their roles and performances. But that world was not yet born.
Instead, as the resulting published indices of government compliance tempered the chest thumping rhetoric that usually accompany such ceremonial openings and occasions, we became persona non grata. The region’s leaders were more focused on glossing over the real with pomp and panacea than focusing on the real and pertinent issues at hand.
The leaders of the day who with one side of their mouths would bemoan the persecution of the likes of Walter Rodney, who died trying to educate and lift the opptunrities and life chances for peoples of the region, did not hesitate to orchestra similar intimidatory actions on those of us trying to make our worlds a better place for others, at not insignificant personal and professional sacrifices.
CARICOM’s Checkered Past
This have all been part of the unsounded and invisible fabric of CARICOM!
Born out of the post-Independence period with the bitter lingering taste of the failed West Indian Federation, CARICOM was already scarred at birth.
Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott’s acerbic description in the Star Apple Kingdom that maps a non-touristic view of the archipelago from Trinidad and Tobago in the South to Jamaica in the North, captures the prevailing impression of Caribbean’s individualistic, self-serving post-Independence leadership nested in the pocket books of conglomerates that followed the break-up of the vision and dream of a real West Indian Federation:
One morning the Caribbean was cut up by seven prime ministers who bought the sea in bolts— one thousand miles of aquamarine with lace trimmings; one million yards of lime-coloured silk, one mile of violet, leagues of cerulean satin— who sold it at a markup to the conglomerates, the same conglomerates who had rented the water spouts for ninety-nine years in exchange for fifty ships, who retailed it in turn to the ministers with only one bank account, who then resold it in ads for the Caribbean Economic Community, till everyone owned a little piece of the sea, from which some made saris, some made bandannas; the rest was offered on trays to white cruise ships taller than the post office; then the dogfights began in the cabinets as to who had first sold the archipelago for this chain store of islands.
That inability to fulfill the dream of Federation propelled Governments to hold on to power by driving wedges into the fragile diversity to fragment social, cultural and ethnic relations into constituent parts. With this as the prevailing condition of domestic politics, CARICOM, which has, and continues to hide its ineffectiveness
Ongoing interference and backlash
Add alongside that, too, the backlash to the participating individuals. This has resulted in the dismantling of several of the civil society entities that contributed to the work, and ongoing interference from rescinding of visas to cutting and warning off potential funders and income sources.
The untold story of advocacy for transparency and accountability resounds of the dirty lyrics of defective governance of the region as most efforts ended at the impervious and impenetrable doors and walls of institutional indifference.
Imported clueless foreign experts
Now that is compound by preferential engagement of clueless foreign ‘experts’ and technologists whose job descriptions do not require understanding of regional cultural realities or know-how on adapt technologies to local or regional relevance.
The result is what we see now in the so-called new technologically-driven systems whose throughputs and outputs mimic their alien originators.
Unadapted to Social Realities & Cultural Norms
One only has to look at the unfolding slew of emerging crises that stem from the inappropriate application of technologies – afflicting the telecommunications, banking and commercial sectors to the beleaguered Company’s Registries – incidentally one of the targets identified among the 113 pages of CARICOM’s unfulfilled commitments on CSMEs.
Despite millions of dollars spent on the Trinidad and Tobago’s companies registry, for instance, it has arguably had more down-time than operational in the last few years! The simply feat of getting one’s registration documents, a struggle of a decade, is akin to resurrecting the dead, because that is, literally what is being demanded, even as it replicates rather than correct errors in the records it is charged to keep.
Reaping the Whirlwind
We reap the whirlwind of wholesale importation and adoption of alien technologies and recording systems insufficiently adapted with fields for data population that are not responsive to the inherited and vastly inadequate systems and cultures of documentation and record-keeping that plague our region. And I have not yet even begun on the slew of challenges that face the actual documentation and archiving for developing data banks that could inform decision making!
Inspiration for Expletives & Dirty Lyrics
We are left saddled with lemons that can only inspire expletives and dirty lyrics when systems fail and inevitably collapse.
Uninformed media sound bytes that merely feed into social media hype present their own dangers to warping development actions. The need for media re-education in identifying, analysing and reporting development issues, as is the need for re/educating public and private sector officials and transforming bureaucratic practices to reverse embedded negative cultures that perpetuate inertia in governance has been dirty lyrics to the ears of decision makers.
Indeed, as the President recognises, it is not a ‘soft issue’. It permeates the systemised cultures embedded in personal and institutional practice.
Looking forward A rejuvenated CARICOM @ 50
There is no doubt that the just-concluded meeting of CARICOM saw an unprecedented rise in the level of energy and focus on its duties – which can to no short measure be attributed to its prevailing Chair who has inspired such descriptions as inspiring, indefatigable and visionary.
With a management style that networks and engages to build continuity in action from the previous Chair, Prime Minister of Dominica, to the Prime Minister of Grenada who will succeed him for the next six-months and the commitment by Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley to join the continuum for action, CARICOM is one leap ahead of where it has been over the past half a century.
Sustainable energetic new leadership
One can only hope that the youthful energy of this new bunch of emerging leaders can be sustained and strengthened to withstand the ever present pressures of politicking and politrickry and continue this restart to strengthen CARICOM as an institution capable of taking its place and holding its own among the regional blocs.
At 50 CARICOM is is dire need of not just new dreamers, but also, of a new dream.
Happy International Women’s Day on the theme of Women Techmakers Impact the World, Happy International Women’s Day.
To Be Continued: Next: More Dirty Lyrics … Would The President Fall Prey…
Dr Kris Rampersad on Challenges for Cultural Survival in the Digital Age:
The Full Podcast of Dr Kris Rampersad Cultural Survival in the Digital Age at
ICT Pulse Podcast · ICTP 258: The digital deletion of Caribbean culture and heritage, with Dr Kris Rampersad
This episode is also available on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and Stitcher!
About Dr Kris Rampersad
Dr Kris Rampersad is an independent scholar and international development specialist in culture, media, gender and education and issues of the Global South , SIDS, Latin America and the Caribbean and the the Developing World. Dr Rampersad is a MultiMedia Innovator/Educator Facilitator. She is an independent scholar, National Geographic Educator, UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Facilitator, Global Woman Techmakers’ Ambassador, Google Digital Skills Ambassador and Small Island Innovators’ Ambassador. Internationally, she has served variously as President of the UNESCO Education Commission, Vice President of UNESCO Programme and External Relations Commission, Vice President and Independent Member of the Consultative Body to the InterGovernmental Committee on Intangible Cultural Heritage and Vice President of the Commonwealth Journalists’ Association. Find out More here.
My story: One Night to Bloom,
the short biopic which launched the world’s newest creative genre to Commonwealth Scholars.