William Mahfood, executive member of the Caricom Private Sector Organisation (CPSO) and chairman of the Wisynco Group, has been one of the most vocal Jamaican about the failures of the Caricom Single Market and Economy (CSME), but unlike what some would believe, Mahfood, in his own words, is not anti-Caricom.

“I am very much in favour of Caricom and the CSME,” he tells the Jamaica Observer, before quickly adding the condition “if it follows the rules and the established guidelines that were put in place many years ago.”

For Mahfood, fundamental to those guiding principles which he believes will propel the CSME experiment forward is freedom of movement for people.

“To be honest with you, I made it clear from the outset, if one of the key agenda items of the CPSO is not to ensure that there is freedom of movement of people, then I don’t want to have any part to do with it. So it’s an agenda item that we are focusing on, but the problem is at a regional level, the various governments and administrations who come into power do not really want some of these issues to be addressed. Some of the commitments that they have made at a regional level, they don’t want it at a local level and they don’t want it at the national level and so what you end up with is a situation where, what should be the true measure of Caricom, it’s not achieving its own objective,” Mahfood told Sunday Finance.

The West Indies Federation (1958 to 1962) was short-lived with one of the reasons behind that failure being a lack of agreement on the freedom of movement of people. Sixty years since the failure of that experiment and almost 50 years since the establishment of Caricom, the issue remains a sore point.

“Fifty years later we are at a standstill. It’s like a stalemate,” Mahfood quipped. Under provisions of the CSME, the free movement of people across the region entails the removal of work permits for university graduates, media workers, sports persons, musicians, artists, managers, supervisors, and other service providers.

“Freedom of movement of people can’t come with restrictions of any form,” Mahfood said as he expressed dismay at the small group of people who should be able to move around the region for work. “A farm worker or mason or plumber can’t pick up and go to work in Guyana or Barbados or Trinidad, they just can’t do it and vice versa, unless you have certain minimum required qualifications on paper, and that’s not how it is supposed to be.”

The CPSO executive member also bristled at the fact that Jamaican nationals are often turned back from some countries for no other reason than their nationality and rails against non-tariff barriers which are set up in individual states to restrict the free movements of goods. As part of the CPSO, he is hoping to bring about change.

“If we don’t have these issues dealt with within five years of the start of the CPSO, where real meaningful change takes place, personally, I won’t have any more time to spend on trying to champion these issues, I just don’t have that time. “

“Do I think we are flogging a dead horse, no. But I do see tremendous hurdles and without the will and the desire of the political administrations around the region, I don’t see how it’s going to happen, and that’s really what concerns me,” Mahfood adds.

He is also advocating for the CSME to go further than it is considering at the moment.

“Why do we have a single stock exchange in each market? We should have one regional stock exchange. It would make it much more efficient, it would provide a lot more liquidity to the capital markets and even financial regulations. It would be far more cost-efficient, but each country has a view that they are a fiefdom and doesn’t want to give up control. Until we can overcome that, To a large extent a lot of that is ego, a lot of that is politically motivated and a lot of bureaucracy which we can’t seem to get over.”

For the CSME to work, Mahfood points to the European Union as a model to follow and said Britain didn’t last in that single market and economy, because it has “one foot in, one foot out”

“If we are going to go down that road of being a single market and economy, we need to have things like freedom of movement of capital, goods and people. We would have to have regional coordination around financial services. Eventually we are going to have to have a single currency, and once you have gone that route, it’s almost hard to turn back.”

Mahfood added to Sunday Finance, “If you ask me realistically if it will ever happen, I would say never. I can’t see the regional governments agreeing to it.”