Dear Editor,
The miniatures or miniaturised have yielded their products – a cumulative boomerang to the policy of micro-management as practised persistently by the Jagdeo Administration.
It is instructive that all the protestors and protestations over the Lusignan tragedy, have been levelled at the President, assigning to him full responsibility for the patent lack of security in Lusignan (and everywhere else).
It is equally instructive that the Minister of Home Affairs is hardly perceived, if at all, as being culpable. This clearly implies how insignificant a player the Minister is regarded to be in the whole national security scenario.
His miniaturised status is of course the result of the micro-management which pervades the Jagdeo Administration. It will be small comfort for that minister that he does not stand, or kneel, alone. His colleagues project equally emasculated images.
It is a pervasive management culture which negatively impacts on the performance of our Joint Forces, who have been overwhelmed by the policy of miniaturisation ever since 1992, when the new ascendants to office instinctively decided that the ‘forces’ were a combined threat; rather than two professional entities steeped in their respective traditions of honour.
Today, in 2008, they project the insecurity which emanates from the Commander-in-Chief. They are no longer their own decision-makers, for they can never be certain when they are right. They follow instructions which when the implementation results in failure they must take the blame, uncomplainingly. They would have known better but would not have the benefit of authority to give advice to their micro-managers. The donor helpers sit by haplessly silent, and, at least frustrated.
The most recent announcement concerning the provision of equipment ‘to build capacity’ is a fallacy. Equipment does not have capacity. It is the people who use them, those who must make the judgment how and when to use the equipment.
The level of the human resource capacity can be measured by how it is valued. Everyone knows, for example, how underpaid the police force is. Indeed one should reflect on the terminology ‘force’. Certainly the effectiveness of the force on the ground is questionable.
Arguably this persistent under-performance reflects the degree of demoralisation among these ‘forces’. They have in fact been micro-managed into ineffectiveness. But there is no indication that the ‘powers’ involved understand the dimensions of the lack of self-confidence that has been engendered.
Their own myopia is again evident in the recent appointment of what must be the weakest Court of Appeal in the history of Guyana and of the relevant regional institutions of which this country is a part.
The obstinacy which insists in diminishing the status, authority and integrity of our institutions and their leaders, is once more revealed in the selection of persons who must wonder why they have been so compromised, unless of course they do not indulge in serious self-evaluation.
All those personnel who were complicit in this particular exercise must feel at least embarrassed, if not ashamed. On any grounds they should withdraw from the position of responsibility they currently hold. They should ponder on the legacy they would have bestowed on Guyana, however reluctant accessories they have been to this explicit charade that is bound to provoke a negative and undesirable image for this nation, and more particularly for those who would have undertaken the vaunted Justice Reform initiative.
Yours faithfully,
Eliah Bijay
