Dear Editor,
I couldn’t help laughing out loud and then suddenly turning angry on reading your news item, ‘CANU staff who fail polygraph to be fired’ (May 10), attributed to President Bharrat Jagdeo.
This government has been making some dumb moves over the past years, but this one takes the cake. This has to be the dumbest move for any government in a modern world to take against its employees, because even though lie detector tests are helpful in gauging a person’s possible honesty or truthfulness in a contentious issue, it is not pure science and is not even admissible in a court of law.
Hard evidence is what courts of law go by and that is the standard that government ought to stick to – the law, because if employees who get fired for failing a polygraph test take their wrongful termination grievance to court, the court is going to ask the government for hard evidence, not the results of a polygraph test. What if a person, so conscious they are being placed under scrutiny with wires hanging off their body, feels nervous about the whole proceeding, yet they are innocent? Should they get fired for being nervous?
Moreover, would the President subject himself and those of his cabinet to lie detector tests?
Mr Editor, this polygraph test move by the President can also become a precedent setting move that can give him a free hand to fire people he does not like. Now, can you imagine the government doing polygraph tests on the Guyana Police Force with a view to firing those who fail? We won’t have a force within a week! And this is not limited to the GPF!
To stop this latest in a string of government sponsored assininities, more a form of discrimination since it targets only one set of government employees, I think the GPSU should seek a court injunction barring the Presi-dent and or his designees from administering polygraph tests against GRA officers, on the grounds that such tests are not scientific enough to be accepted in courts of law, and that they can be arbitrarily used by the state to fire persons at will or for flimsy reasons.
In fact, there is no agreement between government and the unions representing employees of the state for employees to be fired on the grounds of failing polygraph tests.
I know the President is scheduled to serve until 2011, but his actions and remarks of late are disturbing enough to suggest to the Central Executive of the PPP to seriously consider recalling President Jagdeo by August this year, in the interest of returning a semblance of sanity to government and a sense of normalcy to the people of Guyana. The PPP gambled when they experimented with taking a chance on President Jagdeo’s youthfulness, but though he may have the energy, he lacks the vision and wisdom, and these deficiencies are hurting the PPP and the people of Guyana.
I asked before and I ask again: Does the PPP really care? Or are they waiting for an implosion?
Yours faithfully,
Emile Mervin
