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