I have some pretty definite views about the Guyana public service, born of some theoretical understanding of how and what it should be doing in modern times and a quite lengthy sojourn in it. Thus, when I was requested to appear before the Public Service Commission of Inquiry established by the government in August 2015 and chaired by Professor Harold Lutchman with members Ms. Sandra Jones and Mr. Samuel Goolsarran, I gladly accepted.
The focus of the commission is upon the traditional public service – the civil service, which falls under the mandate of the Public Service Commission – and its mandate is sufficiently broad to allow the few comments I wanted to make.
Initially, allow me to make a trite but somewhat important point: unless we fix the civil service we will not be able to successfully fix the broader public service. Moreover, all social institutions depend to some extent upon the civil service. For example, it is the civil service that mainly interfaces with the political directorate to formulate and monitor social policy. As such, if it is ineffective that inefficiency negatively affects national competitiveness, and from where I stand, it is too unfocused and cumbersome to properly accomplish its tasks.
The commission indicated that it was partly motivated to invite me because of some comments I made in ‘When partisan necessity trumped good governance’ (SN 02/09/2015). In that article I argued that in terms of public service management, in a given case the present government’s actions contradicted its stated principles. I suggested that this outcome resulted from the nature of both our society and public service management.
Most political systems expect civil servants to be neutral and objective. We follow the British tradition and the following political/civil servant relationship can be extrapolated from our president’s vision given in the abovementioned article.
Civil servants must serve their political masters, be strictly impartial about party politics and ministerial policies and must not enter the political fray. Ministers must not ask civil servants to perform political tasks. Appointment and promotion in the civil service should not involve political considerations or be affected by a change in government. Even parliamentary committees should not ask civil servants questions in the field of political controversy. Ministers, not public servants, should defend departmental policy in public. The advice civil servants give their ministers is confidential and they should not be required to reveal it in public. Parliamentary committees must not ask questions about the conduct of particular civil servants or about the advice they give their ministers.
Yet, after only a few months in office, the government presented as an ideal public servant someone who had broken all the fundamental pillars of its stated policy. This occurred because the regime wanted to publicly send the message that it was willing to work with other ethnic groups and even senior members of the previous PPP/C government. Nevertheless, it played the ethnic game for political gain: the kind of ethnic entrepreneurship that has become endemic in the society.
The solution to this longstanding Guyanese dilemma is not technical but political and thus outside the remit of the commission. It requires some way of building broad ethnic consensus and this can only be done by having the major ethnic players at the policymaking and executing table. Since this is not likely to happen soon, the political context in which the recommendations of the commission will have to be implemented will be a limiting one.
As I pointed out to the commission, in my view had the possible negative consequences of this limitation been marginally recognised by those who established it, they would have invited the major public management stakeholders, the PPP/C and the relevant trade unions to have representatives on the commission. This is particularly so since at least two of the present commissioners have close ties with the ruling groups.
Relevant here but also generally, in terms of coalition political behaviour, I detect an attempt to sell the public a quite utopian/opportunistic notion of acting neutrally. It appears that once the regime believes that one can be useful to it, one merely needs to state one’s intention to be neutral and one can be safely placed in a position that requires objectivity. The fact is that if justice must be seen to be done, persons who are given positions in which they are expected to act neutrally must have previously been in neutral positions and be generally believed to have acted neutrally.
Associated with the above are two perennial problems of public management, which in my view the commission of inquiry will be foolhardy not to recognise and suggest some kind of accommodation. The first, which I will deal with today, relates to the propensity of politicians to trust only those inside their immediate circle and their confidantes.
The second problem we are observing at this very moment in terms of the complaints about dismissals and appointments by the present regime: the public service is usually viewed as a rich source of political patronage
In so far as governments want people in top positions that they can trust, many modern political systems have accepted the infusion of political types at the top of the public service; ministerial cabinets, political advisers and assistants, etc.
The increase of political people was so prominent under British Prime Minister Tony Blair that Michael Foley made some observations that might be useful to all those who now seek to reform our semi-presidential political system.
Foley claimed that by the time Tony Blair was midway through his premiership of Britain, there had been a sufficient accretion of power to that office to warrant the title he chose for his book (The British Presidency. (2001) Manchester University Press). Among other things, the political staff was significantly increased and government was centralised under the prime minister, who consistently intervened in the work of other ministries. Little interest was shown in parliament where the PM restricted his activities to Prime Minister’s Questions. Indeed, in the 2003-2004 sessions Blair only voted 5% of the time. Foley claimed that modern politics places much greater emphasis on leadership roles. Political marketing requires strong branding that party leaders and presidential candidates are expected to provide.
Maybe the commission could speak to an arrangement which seeks to facilitate the wishes of those in the corridors of power and also makes some attempt to limit the scope of such an arrangement and specify clearly the kind of relationship such people should have with public servants.
