The Deputy Speaker of Parliament, Rt. Hon. Thomas Tayebwa, has challenged lawmakers from the Pacific region to back institutional reforms aimed at weaning the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States (OACPS) Parliamentary Assembly off its heavy reliance on external funding.
Tayebwa, who serves as the President of the OACPS and Co-President of the OACPS-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly, delivered the message during a consultative meeting with the Pacific Parliamentary Group in Brussels on Thursday.
A central pillars of Tayebwa’s reform agenda is achieving financial sovereignty. He revealed that previous engagements with African and Caribbean parliamentarians highlighted deep concerns over how external financing bottlenecks the Assembly’s legislative calendar.
“Our reliance on external financing has made planning difficult and limited our ability to act on our priorities,” Tayebwa warned. “If we don’t have our own means to organise our work and implement it, then we shall remain just making speeches.”
To solve this, Tayebwa proposed a Common Fund where the three geopolitical blocs contribute according to their respective economic capacities. This fund would directly finance shared assembly operations and regional legislative agendas, with each region retaining the autonomy to decide which specific interventions to bankroll.
Tayebwa outlined several structural adjustments ahead of chairing the upcoming 65th Session of the OACPS Parliamentary Assembly:
Protecting fair regional representation by preserving the strict two-year rotation policy for top leadership offices.
Recruiting specialized administrative staff to oversee swift document distribution, research depth, and concrete follow-ups on resolutions.
Upgrading working groups so that OACPS resolutions can translate effectively into national legislation, national budgets, and domestic oversight.
Diversifying the Assembly’s alliances beyond traditional ties with the European Parliament. “We need an agenda of our own that extends beyond our meetings with the European Parliament,” Tayebwa noted.
Tayebwa called on the Pacific Parliamentary Group to leverage their unique regional realities to steer the global assembly’s priorities. He identified climate resilience, ocean governance, fisheries management, and transnational connectivity as core fields where Pacific lawmakers possess vital, frontline expertise that should shape future OACPS policies.
The Brussels consultations are part of Tayebwa’s strategic outreach to align Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific into a unified legislative bloc before joint sessions with the EU commence.
