According to East Timorese diplomat Zacarias da Costa, at the moment, the CPLP executive secretariat has almost a third less people than it should have, which for a small international organization like the CPLP "is a lot".
This problem was already recognized by the Member States at the XXVII Ordinary Meeting of the CPLP Council of Ministers, which took place on 3 June. Remember that Angola now has the rotating presidency of the community.
"We have a lack of staff in the [executive] secretariat. Almost a third of the staff is yet to be recruited," Zacarias da Costa told Lusa. "For a small international organization like ours, having almost a third of the staff to be recruited is a lot", he stressed. So "this is an issue that represents a huge constraint for the management of this house", he stressed, a problem to which the organization's nine member states have been alerting.
For Zacarias da Costa, this is a fact that also means that the Member States themselves must speed up the discussion of the regulation "on their equitable representation in the executive secretariat".
The document referred to by Zacarias da Costa has been under discussion for about four years between the nine member countries of the CPLP and, once concluded, will have to go for approval by the Council of Ministers and the Summit of Heads of State and Government of the organization .
But as the next summit should only take place in mid-2023 and the CPLP will not be able to wait that long to recruit people, explained the diplomat, the Luanda Council of Ministers has mandated the executive secretariat to prepare a document that can accelerate the necessary recruitment.
Thus, Zacarias da Costa and his team are preparing an internal staff regulation (RIP), which enshrines the principle of equitable representation of the nine countries, so that the organization can start recruiting as early as next year.
This document will, however, have to be consulted in advance by the CPLP Permanent Consultation Committee (CCP), that is, at one of the monthly meetings of ambassadors representing the nine member states of the organization in Lisbon, where the headquarters of the organization.
"We will have to finish by the end of this year [the discussion of the equitable representation of the member states], in order to start the recruitment of staff, which has already been delayed for two or three years, next year", he said.
For the diplomat, this is one of the priority issues, since the organization's financial situation is already improving.
According to Lusa, learned from other CPLP sources, there have already been recruitments that have had an unfavorable opinion from ambassadors because they did not consider that they covered the principles of equity in the representation of the Member States in the total number of employees of the executive secretariat, despite the fact that the document that will establish these criteria for the first time is still under discussion.
"We are not very bad in financial terms", because "in fact, the Member States all made a huge effort", to pay their arrears of quotas, said Zacarias da Costa.
Thus, the situation today is still "not ideal", because "obviously there are still delays", but it is already "much better", he considered.
Angola, Brazil, Cano Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, Mozambique, Portugal, São Tomé and Príncipe and Timor-Leste are the nine Member States of the CPLP.
