CARICOM secretary general to step down

Trinidad, CMC:

Less than a month after telling journalists that he "never came to stay forever", Edwin Carrington has informed Caribbean Community (CARICOM) leaders of his intention to step down as the region's premier public servant at year end.

After 18 years on the job, Carrington is the longest serving CARICOM Secretary General and has been the recipient of national awards from Barbados, Belize, Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, as well as from the Dominican Republic, Italy and Spain.

But in recent months, the leadership of the Georgetown-based CARICOM Secretariat had been called into question, and during the just concluded summit of regional leaders in Jamaica, newspaper editorials fingered the 72-year-old Carrington as among the main culprits.

"The real problem of CARICOM is the comprehensive failure of the management, specifically the leadership of the Secretariat. The performance of the CARICOM Secretariat over the last 10 to 15 years has happened under the watch of the current secretary general and whether it is his fault or not, the record points to the need for a change of leadership," the editorial in one of Jamaica's daily newspapers argued last month.

Was not permanent

Carrington himself had hinted at the possibility of parting ways, when, as the regional leaders emerged from their three-day summit and amid talk of reviewing the organisational structure of the Secretariat to ensure that it is properly structured and resourced, he said he did not take the job in 1992 on a permanent basis.

The CARICOM statement said that during his tenure, Carrington, an economist by training, oversaw the revision of the Treaty of Chaguaramas and the consequent transition of the Community from a Common Market to a Single Market in 2006.

"Under his secretary-generalship, the platform is also being set for eventual evolution of the Community to include a Single Economy - the framework which Heads of Government have undertaken to create by 2015," the statement said.