Rwan­dan Pres­i­dent Paul Kagame has urged Caribbean Com­mu­ni­ty (Cari­com) coun­tries to move be­yond de­c­la­ra­tions of in­tent and look to so­lid­i­fy their re­la­tion­ship with Africa while fo­cus­ing “on con­crete ini­tia­tives which ad­dress the chal­lenges that na­tions like ours face to­day.”

Kagame, in his first-ever vis­it to T&T, ad­dressed Cari­com lead­ers on the fi­nal day of their 45th an­nu­al sum­mit. Ac­cord­ing to a Caribbean Me­dia Cor­po­ra­tion (CMC) re­port, Kagame told the gath­er­ing, “We need to come to­geth­er in re­al terms …”

He said over the past 50 years, Cari­com had dis­tin­guished it­self as one of the most vi­brant re­gion­al in­te­gra­tion or­gan­i­sa­tions in the de­vel­op­ing world with “many ac­com­plish­ments.”

Kagame said that the Or­ga­ni­za­tion of African Uni­ty, as the African Union was orig­i­nal­ly known, was found­ed ten years ear­li­er than Cari­com in 1963 and that “these an­niver­saries are an op­por­tu­ni­ty to re­spond to the de­sire for clos­er col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween our two re­gions.”

He added, “We are close­ly linked. The hor­rors of the Mid­dle Pas­sage, and the in­dig­ni­ties of colo­nial­ism, join our peo­ples in a shared sto­ry of strug­gle, sur­vival, re­silience, and, ul­ti­mate­ly, re­new­al.”