With the Commission of Enquiry into the operations of the Guyana Public Service having only just gotten underway, it is evident that the commission’s journey will be a long and interesting one and that the outcomes – many of them – will spark more political cat-sparring between the Granger administration and the opposition PPP/C.
The commission along with the planned public service training institution are the ‘creatures’ of President Granger and one can assume that it is his wish that these serve to good effect. In so far as delivering effective government is concerned a great deal has always ridden on the public service.
The other initial point that should be made is that if it is allowed to, the deliberations of the COI can easily take up the full five years of the incumbent administration. Again, it is entirely reasonable to assume that this is not the intention. The quicker the deliberations proceed and conclude and the recommendations transform themselves into corrective/ remedial action, the quicker we can anticipate those remedies in the administration of government that have to do with a more competent, more capable public service.
Even at this early stage there have been some rather startling revelations which, taken at face value, point to a public service that has had to endure a torrid time over the years. If it strains credulity to suggest that everything was hunky-dory with the public service under either the People’s National Congress or the People’s National Congress/Reform administrations, some of the testimony that has been shared with the COI up to this time points to a descent into considerable deformity over the past two decades or so under the PPP/C administration.
The public service in post-independence Guyana has always been, to a greater or lesser extent, under the political control of government. There is, however, evidence that prior to the assumption of the PPP/C to office, the institutions and systems that dictated the workings of the public service – like the Public Service Commission, for example – actually worked. The more recent disfigurement of the public service is largely a function of the then PPP/C administration’s focus on supplanting an institution which it considered to be loyal to its predecessor. Accordingly, it set about cutting a swathe through ministries and other state entities, removing or neutralizing those it chose to and creating a labyrinthine maze of consultants and a regimen of other impositions that cynically set aside the rules and institutions of the public service. While it obviously could not send home the entire existing public service it certainly did its best to create a parallel system in its own image and likeness.
Much of this bizarre pursuit was underpinned by a fearful nepotism and a culture of political connections that often took no account of either qualifications or capacity to get the job done.
The testimony of Principal Personnel Officer Andrew Grant before the COI speaks poignantly about the cynical manner in which the public service was deformed. Decisions about vacancies in the public service, he told the commission, were simply created at the whims and fancies of the PPP/C Cabinet without the least mindfulness of laid-down procedures or of the Public Service Commission. “Sometimes positions were created just by somebody coming to say fill this position, create this position,” Grant was quoted as saying.
Grant went further, raising questions about the competence of permanent secretaries, asserting that the culture of political appointments led to some PSs being less equipped to follow rules and regulations, given their political obligations. Much of what Grant had to say has been manifested in the day-to-day workings of the public service.
Then there was the testimony of Soyinka Grogan, the Manager of the Scholarship Divi-sion who trotted out a sordid tale about a regime of PSM scholarship awards in which the system appeared to have been hijacked by political higher-ups to a point where even the basic procedure on interviews as part of the selection process was set aside.
These two testimonies alone would appear to provide some revealing insights into the travails of the public service and the extent to which it had become disfigured over time. This, it seems, is simply the tip of the iceberg. There will doubtless be more testimonies and more revelations that will help us to understand why, for example, we have had to live with considerable incompetence at fairly high levels of the public service and why arrogance and a total and complete disregard for the rules of the public service ‒ and sometimes for basic decency – prevailed over so many years. The revelations of the COI might even help us understand phenomena like graft and corruption in public service agencies, much of which has long been referred to in successive reports of the Auditor General.
Nor can there be any excuse for what would appear to have been a giving away of scholarships to the less than deserving which, in essence, amounts not only to squandering our tax dollars but failing to invest wisely in the skills that are needed for the enhancement of the public service. It all amounts to what one might call a burning shame.
