Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley has suggested that Africa-CARICOM Day be celebrated on September 7, recognizing the first-ever Africa-Caribbean Summit aimed at forging stronger social and economic ties between the two global communities.
During Ghana’s 65th Independence Anniversary celebrations at the Cape Coast Stadium last weekend, Mottley said African-Caribbean solidarity received a new boost on September 7, when the first African-CARICOM caucus was organized by the Presidents of Ghana and Kenya, Nana Akfuo-Addo and Uhuru Kenyatta, respectively.
Coming out of that caucus was an agreement to establish a permanent forum for African and Caribbean countries and states jointly coordinated by the African Union and the Guyana-based Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Secretariat.
“We agreed to also take steps that the 7th of September shall forever be known as Africa-CARICOM Day, and we ask you our brothers and sisters in Ghana, as we will in Barbados, to celebrate that day with the knowledge that those of us across the Atlantic can never be divided not even by the forces of history or the passage of times,” said Mottley.
“The establishment of this forum will allow for us to bring about synergies between the CARICOM Single Market and Economy and the African Continental Free Trade Area, and it is significant that in both of these instances, our two countries lead the effort, in your case the African Continental Free Trade Area, and in said contended that there was consensus on a closer working relationship with the United Nations, given Africa and the Caribbean’s shared challenges of adverse effects from climate change, and inequitable vaccine distribution, among others.
“We’ve also agreed that we should collaborate and work much closer with the United Nations because many of our objectives are the same and our mission the same. We may have different routes by which we must get there. But if we have the same destination and if we have the same purpose, then we have a duty to collaborate and cooperate with each other,” she added.
Mottley also said that agreement had been reached and “that collaboration should be heard as we raise our voices against the inequity of vaccine distribution that has bedeviled our world as if they were truly first-class and second-class nations of the world.
“We reject that. We ask ourselves to cooperate equally on the matters of the climate crisis, and we do so conscious that each of us is affected.”
CMC
