ROSEAU, Dominica (CMC) — A leading Caribbean academic is calling for fixed term limits for heads of governments in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) as well as a fixed date for general elections.

Professor Brian Meeks, director of the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute for Social and Economic Studies (SALISES) at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI), who delivered the ninth annual Dame Eugenia Charles Memorial lecture here on Thursday night, said he would support the notion of term limits for Caribbean prime ministers.

“It is something I have thought about long and hard, and the bigger principle is I agree with it in the sense that if you are there for too long, I don’t care how good you are, you become complacent, you become arrogant, you begin to feel like you own the plantation and we need to correct that.

“The secondary principle is that in small countries, great leaders, genuinely good leaders don’t come every day and when you have a genuinely good leader who provides leadership, who is not corrupt… then you don’t want to throw them overboard at the end of their two terms.”

But Meeks argued that one of the principles the region could examine is to institute a process where the prime minister serves two terms and sits out another, before facing the electorate.

“You may want to consider that as an option. In other words you have a principle of only two terms (and) when that person is out and they sit out one electoral term, if they are still good and if people still want them they can have a sort of reprieve where they come back and they serve for a term and you say good bye…”

Professor Meeks said that some regional countries may be thinking along those lines and made reference to the move by the Trinidad and Tobago coalition People’s Partnership Government to amend the Constitution to allow for term limits and recall of legislators.

He said a fixed date for general elections should also be a matter to be considered in the region.

Meeks said there was need also for establishment of “some popular control on the power of the elected Member of Parliament between elections”.

He said this could be achieved “either by instituting a process of recall or as tried in the St Vincent (and the Grenadines) reform experiment which sadly was defeated in (the) referendum, constitutionally requiring the MP to report annually on the work he or she has done”.

He said this would allow the public to examine the party’s manifesto “as well as perhaps the national manifesto becomes a legal document which, if not success in implementation, efforts in that direction which can be recorded. Such an initiative might not in itself end the tradition of effective prime ministerial dictatorship, but would recover some power on behalf of the people at the lower ends of the decision-making process,” he told his audience.