Last week brought some additional revelations from President David Granger about his administration’s ambitions for a Public Service Staff College which, taken together with the ensuing Commission of Inquiry into the Public Service, appear to provide the best ever possibility for the comprehensive reform of a public service which, over the years, has become weak and, in some areas, largely ineffective.
One anticipates that the CoI will have quite a bit to say about some of the reasons why the public service is in the state in which it finds itself. That, indeed, has been one of the primary talking points in the exchanges between many of the witnesses and the members of the commission. Indeed, there were occasions in which those exchanges laid bare the sentiments of both the commissioners and the witnesses on the role played by political intervention in reducing the public service to the impoverished state in which it finds itself.
Last week’s revelations by the President dealt with two sets of issues; the first had to do with the likely scope of the college’s curriculum which, according to the President, will seek to provide “graduates with university level qualifications” and will operate four faculties focusing on International Relations, Defence, Public Administration and Information Technology.
Those disclosures in themselves say a lot about the ambitions of the college since it would seem that apart from providing basic entry level training for public servants, the college seeks to paint with a broader brush, embracing not just the conventional needs of what used to be the old civil service but the much broader army of public service workers, including those functioning in the areas of diplomacy, security and, significantly, information technology.
What will be necessary, of course, is some kind of rationalization of how the college will function vis-à-vis the University of Guyana, which already offers courses in most, if not all of the areas which the President says the new institution will offer. Presumably too, there will be some measure of compulsoriness for public servants to attend the college, whilst other issues like whether or not participants’ performances will influence promotion will have to be taken on board.
We therefore may well be in the shadow of the prospect of a quantum shift in the quality of the public service. It now appears that the advent of the Public Service Staff College might well coincide with the findings of the CoI. Of course, this assessment can take no account of just how much of what the CoI recommends is accepted by the Granger administration.
As much as the staff college and the outcome of the CoI may be critical to the kind of public service that we have in the future, in the final analysis, the key factor will be whether or not government is prepared to suppress what, over the years, has been an incurable tendency to exert as much control as it can over the public service. That, truth be told, has been the principal factor that has impacted on the degeneration of the public service. Corruption, slovenliness, downright incompetence and an overall decline in standards have all, to varying degrees, been functions of the impact of political control.
Here again, media houses represented at the CoI’s hearings would have heard the views of both the commissioners and the witnesses regarding the various political ruses used to keep the public service in check, one of the most worrisome of which has been the circumvention of the Public Service Commission in the creation of contractual arrangements that questionably import permanent secretaries from outside the public service into the system, rendering them directly answerable to politicians. During the course of the CoI’s hearings, the issue of permanent secretaries being answerable to the Head of the Presidential Secretariat under the previous administration and apparently to the Minister of State in the current one arose. Such a circumstance, it was argued at some of the hearings, renders the public service continually vulnerable to the kind of political control and manipulation that makes a mockery of the notion of a professional public service.
So if no one doubts that public service reforms – as reflected in the creation of a staff college and the setting up of a CoI – are well intentioned, by far the biggest challenge to a qualitatively enhanced public service reposes in the prevailing political culture which, until now, appears to offer no clear indication that it is ready to embrace the virtues of independence and neutrality as corollaries to a better public service. That is a step that the government simply must take.
Now, of course, that the President has set out the ambitions of the Public Service Staff College, other questions arise, like how to fund an institution with such lofty ambitions, whether the human resources are available locally to provide the services which the college seeks to offer, and whether public servants, serving and aspiring, living and working in the far-flung corners of the country will have equal access to what the college has to offer.
What a well-run, professionally oriented staff college does as well is to raise the prospects of an incentive for the creation of worthwhile career paths though – and the government needs to remind itself of this – a professional public service will always be tied, to some extent to relatively attractive salaries.
So that while the quality of the public service has, in many areas, continually fallen short of being adequate (and accepting entirely the virtues of the new initiatives that would appear to be on the cards) the really crippling blow to the public service is its political disfigurement which has afforded ministers of government and other politically influential personages (many if not most of them with a decidedly questionable understanding of the real role of the public service) the prerogative of disdainfully casting aside procedures, supplanting them with ill-intentioned and altogether contrived aberrations frequently designed to facilitate some questionable end.
The truth is that if the advent of a staff college for public servants and a Commission of Inquiry into the Public Service are good starting points, it is what the politicians see as the need to cast long and disfiguring shadows that we need most to eradicate if real public service reform is to be realized. That is something that President Granger cannot afford to lose sight of.
