George Clarence Fung-On, former Minister of the Public Service and Chairman of the Public Service Commission, died on February 16, aged 85.
The British Guiana Civil Service that George Fung-On joined as a clerk sixty-five years ago was very different from the Public Service over which he presided as chairman of the Public Service Commission up to six weeks before his death.
In the 1940s, the Chief Secretary’s Office was the centre of the entire administrative system since nearly all matters of importance had to be channelled through it for the governor’s deliberation. Invariably an English civil servant, the chief secretary was primus inter pares in the triumvirate that included the financial secretary and the attorney general in charge of the colony’s affairs under the governor. Beneath them were heads of departments and other senior civil servants, also English, who constituted a cloistral caste of mandarins.
The Chief Secretary’s Office – commonly known as CSO – located imposingly in the upper storey of the Public Buildings (now Parliament Building), was the sanctum sanctorum at the vortex of the hierarchy of the bureaucracy, and only slowly were a few low-level locals admitted thereto. Not only was George Fung-On one of those few, but he was destined to spend almost his entire career during the colonial era immured in the CSO, accumulating experience, becoming indispensable and rising effortlessly with the effluxion of time.
Largely because he never served long enough in a line ministry, appointment to the rank of permanent secretary eluded him. His combined service in the CSO and later the PSC, apart from making him a master of the minutiae needed to administer a complex bureaucracy, however, earned him the secretaryship to the PSC, a tad lower than the position of PS. It was in the Public Service Commission that the constitution invested supreme control of personnel in the state bureaucracy. Becoming chairman at age 82, therefore, was an exciting climax to George Fung-On’s life-long love affair with the civil service.
Despite the service’s low rate of pay and slow rate of promotion, the notion of belonging to an
