Fresh­ly mint­ed For­eign Min­is­ter Dr Su­ruj Ram­bachan has ap­pro­pri­ate­ly ini­ti­at­ed his pub­lic ex­po­sure at the helm of the For­eign Min­istry by adopt­ing a con­sul­ta­tive, trans­paren­cy and ac­count­abil­i­ty-based strat­e­gy dur­ing his in­ter­ac­tion with his staff, busi­ness, aca­d­e­m­ic and civic so­ci­ety rep­re­sen­ta­tives at the Cara Suites, Clax­ton Bay, re­treat held last week Wednes­day.

Such an ap­proach is con­sis­tent with the new peo­ple-cen­tred, par­tic­i­pa­to­ry gov­er­nance modus operan­di that un­der­pins the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship man­i­festo. It will in­spire con­fi­dence and cred­i­bil­i­ty in his fresh new col­lec­tive ap­proach to the process of for­mu­lat­ing and de­ter­min­ing the con­tours of our for­eign re­la­tions. The nexus con­nect­ing for­eign pol­i­cy with the de­mands of our do­mes­tic de­vel­op­ment agen­da, in­clud­ing ad­dress­ing the eco­nom­ic di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion im­per­a­tive, was ef­fec­tive­ly es­tab­lished dur­ing the ex­changes at the re­treat and will be ac­cord­ed the req­ui­site pri­ma­cy in the list of for­eign pol­i­cy pri­or­i­ties.

It was clear­ly ev­i­denced at the sem­i­nar that Ram­bachan pro­pos­es to use his im­pres­sive back­ground in the prin­ci­ples and prac­tice of busi­ness man­age­ment to re­form and re­con­sti­tute the op­er­at­ing cul­ture of his min­istry to that of a busi­ness with a hu­man face. It will re­sult in the ef­fec­tive mo­bil­i­sa­tion and har­ness­ing of the enor­mous high-grade di­verse hu­man cap­i­tal present at the min­istry that is schooled in the art and sci­ence of what he termed to be T&T's new brand of "val­ue-for- mon­ey" diplo­ma­cy.

The ac­tive par­tic­i­pa­tion, cre­ative pre­sen­ta­tions and pre­scrip­tions for the way for­ward com­ing from the staff of the In­sti­tute of In­ter­na­tion­al Re­la­tions, the Cham­bers of Com­merce from San Fer­nan­do, Ch­agua­nas and West­moor­ings, as well from for­mer T&T diplo­mats and busi­ness ex­ec­u­tives au­gur well for the forg­ing of new fron­tiers and func­tion­al part­ner­ships–back­ward and for­ward link­ages–in pros­e­cut­ing our trade ex­pan­sion and for­eign in­vest­ment in­flows agen­da on the re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al stages. We must wish Ram­bachan well in his new in­car­na­tion.

Stephen Kan­gal

Ca­roni