Those Guyanese who were not afforded the opportunity of being present to witness at least some of the hearings of the Commission of Inquiry into the Public Service would have been denied an important opportunity to arrive at a helpful understanding of the condition of the public service including, particularly, some of the reasons why it is the way it is in the first place. To grasp the significance of the hearings too, one would have had to understand the public service in its historical context including the overwhelming importance of its mission and why it is in the country’s interest that it reverts to being, wholly and solely, a servant of the state.
Some of the most absorbing sessions of the hearings dealt with the reflections of witnesses – some of them long-retired public servants ‒ on just how unworkable the arrangements (for want of a better word) that govern the administration of the public service have become, not least, the fact that some of the most critical areas of public service administration including appointments, promotions and discipline have become sufficiently saturated with political intervention to have completely disfigured the mechanisms that were created to govern the administration of the public service in the first place.
There were instances in which it was clear that what took a number of long-retired public servants to those hearings was a sense that what the CoI may well represent is the last opportunity in their particular lifetime to salvage the institution of the public service. You could sometimes almost cut the pride and the passion in their nostalgic, those-were-the-days submissions, and the contempt and cynicism that sometimes characterised their reflections on the contemporary public service,
Some of the most riveting exchanges between the members of the Commission of Inquiry and the witnesses who gave evidence had to do with what can only be described as the emasculation of the Public Service Commission in favour of the present haphazard political arrangements that apply in areas like appointments and discipline and which make a complete mockery of the notion of a neutral public service.
What is patently obvious, on reflection, is that the public service, over the years, has had to endure an enormous amount of crude massaging by the political powers that be, to the extent that it is now questionable whether, in the true sense of the word, we can, these days, lay claim to possessing a legitimate public service.
No less significant from the standpoint of the integrity of the public service has been the fact that in most if not all instances, those permanent secretaries of relatively recent vintage owe their appointments and their survival to the Office of the President, rather than the Public Service Commission as it used to be, and when one thinks of a permanent secretary – given the extent of his/her authority within a ministry or department – being directly answerable to functionaries in the President’s Office, it can be argued that that is virtually akin to placing the entire public service at the mercy of the political directorate. Truth be told, more than one permanent secretary who spoke at the hearings appeared discomfitted with the circumstances of contractual arrangements in which there is little, if any, room for negotiation.
Interestingly, and not altogether surprisingly, some of them appear to be mindful of the constricting environment of an Orwellian ‘big brother’ phenomenon. In cases, for example, where a disciplinary matter might arise at the level of a permanent secretary it would be a political functionary with whom that permanent secretary would find himself confronted, so that the outcomes would have to do with prejudiced political evaluations rather than with entrenched rules and regulations that provide an infinitely greater measure of protection against ‘cowboy’ justice.
One question that arose during some of these exchanges at the CoI had to do with just how effective (professional, might be a more appropriate term here) a permanent secretary might be if he came to feel that the requirement of adhering to the rules, regulations and circulars that ought correctly to serve as his administrative rudder had become thoroughly trumped by the whims and fancies of politicians who are not constrained in their decision-making by any such rigorous guidelines.
If the intensity of these discourses is anything to go by, one expects that the outcomes of the CoI would paint with a much broader brush than simply those administrative and procedural issues that have to do with wages and salaries and leave and promotion. Indeed, it seemed that the commission was not lacking in an appreciation of those other equally fundamental flaws that bedevil the public service including the emasculation of some of those very institutions – like the Public Service Commission – from which the public service has always derived it authority. Whatever else derives from the outcomes of the CoI the issue of restoring the political neutrality of the public service is not an issue that can be averted if the inquiry is to make sense in the first place. In the final analysis the findings of the Commission of Inquiry may well, in themselves, turn out to be a challenge for the political administration since, in some respects, it will probably be asked to surrender some of those controls that it currently enjoys. That is as it should be.
