It was Ram & McRae which pointed out in their 2015 ‘Focus on Guyana’s National Budget’ that the public service is broken and therefore the government would not be able to avoid hiring some people on contract while the problems in the system are being addressed. And fixing a system, it might be added, is not a short-term exercise. Institutions are quickly broken down, but not so easily built back up again.
That conceded, last year the number of contract employees increased from 3,628 to 3,671. While this was a small increase, Ram & McRae nevertheless described it as “point[ing] in the wrong direction,” even taking the reorganization of the ministries into account. The company also said that the employment cost for contract employees was projected to increase year on year by 15%, while for public sector wages as a whole the increase would be only 11%.
This year the Focus drew attention to the fact that the number of contract employees had again increased, as well as the cost associated with hiring them. Between 2011 and 2016, it said, expenditure on contract employees had risen from $5,274 million to $11,230 million. Ram & McRae homed in on the example of the Ministry of the Presidency which reported an increase in the number of those working on contract from 298 to 505. On Wednesday we reported that there were some agencies, however, such as the Parliament Office and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs which had reduced their complement of contract employees, although most had increased the numbers.
By the following day a statement had been issued in which Minister Joseph Harmon denied that there had been an increase in the number of contract employees who had been hired. The Ministry of the Presidency, he said, now included the Ministry of Social Cohesion, the Ministry of Citizenship, the Public Service Department (previously a standalone ministry), as well as departments such as the General Registrar’s Office, Immigration, E-governance and the National Community Development Council; so there could be no comparison between the present Ministry of the Presidency and the former Office of the President.
As far as the actual operational strength of the core ministry was concerned, the statement said that this had gone down. “In May 2015, we had 375 staff working at OP. In January 2016, we have 325… It is that organizational changes have taken place,” Minister Harmon was quoted as saying. Minister of Natural Resources Raphael Trotman hewed to the same line: “It is not that this government has gone out and hired hundreds of people because it feels it wants to do so,” he was quoted as saying; it was because of the bundling of the various divisions which gave what appeared to be a frightening figure.
The first thing to be remarked on is quite simply that Minister Harmon’s statements do not address whether the grand total of contract employees in government has decreased, increased or stayed the same. This is a different question from whether the number in the Ministry of the Presidency itself has risen, and whether the figure in that particular instance can be justified or not. So Minister Harmon needs to address the matter of total figures and total costs across government as a whole and how these compare with last year and the year before that, rather than wriggle out by concentrating on the Ministry of the Presidency alone.
The matter is of no small interest to the public, considering that more than one member of the coalition before coming into office had spoken emphatically about “dismantling” the system of contract employees in the public sector because it undermined and demoralised the public service, and subjected it to political influence. Contract employees, after all, are appointed by politicians who are often tempted to apply principles other than those of merit when hiring personnel.
Which brings us back to the Ram & McRae comments cited earlier that it will be necessary given the state of the public service to hire some personnel on contract. Minister Harmon insisted that there had been no “indiscriminate hiring of contract employees.” Some of the new employees, he said, had been brought back “because of their skills… you had to bring back people who can bring back the standards to run a country.” Some of their predecessors, he went on to say, had been unable to perform at the required standards, whereas the coalition appointees were all “aptly qualified and skilled professionals.”
Now it is perfectly true that under the previous administration there had been a number of indisputably political appointees, some of whom were given sinecures. However, any increase in the numbers of those on contract in government service now will require more detailed justifications for the expenditure on their skills than Minister Harmon seems disposed to provide. Just who are these people, what is their expertise, and for which ministries have they been retained? Even in the case of the Ministry of the Presidency, are all these contract employees really needed? Given the duplication and overlap in government responsibilities as a whole, it seems hardly credible, for example, that the Ministry of the Presidency as a whole requires the unique skills of 505 contract employees, or even 325 for ministry operations per se. Again, what are they all doing exactly?
In addition, it should not be forgotten that we now have new ministries falling under the umbrella of the Ministry of the Presidency which never existed before, such as Citizenship and Social Cohesion. They would have had no ministerial staff of their own prior to May last year, and one supposes, therefore, that they have hired employees on contract. These ministries themselves, it might be observed, are redundant in our context, and by extension so will be any contract workers they have hired.
Mr Harmon did refer to the measures the administration is undertaking to build the public service, which no one would have any quarrel with. There is another dimension, however, to which attention was also drawn in last year’s Focus, namely the fact that the Public Service Commission is in poor shape. Since it is responsible for the hiring of public officers, much depends on its efficacy, and as a consequence it is clearly in need of presidential attention.
