President David Granger “sees nothing wrong” with the appointment of retired or serving military officers to civilian posts and maintains that the appointments are being made based on competence.
“I don’t see that anything could be wrong in asking a Colonel here or a Brigadier there to head a Commission of Inquiry. The question is—Are they competent?” he said, while responding to questions on the taping of this week’s edition of the Public Interest interview programme, which will be broadcast this evening.
President Granger has in recent months appointed Retired Brigadier Bruce Lovell to conduct a Commission of Inquiry (CoI) into corruption allegations made against the Customs Anti-Narcotics (CANU); Retired Colonel Windee Algernon to conduct a CoI into a recent deadly fire at the Children’s Drop-in Centre; and serving Colonel Nazrul Hussain has been appointed to head the Department of National Events of the Ministry of the Presidency. The opposition People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) has labelled these appointment and others a sign of the “growing militarisation” of the state and government apparatus.
In a statement last week, the PPP/C said that “the Granger administration has a penchant for placing retired and serving military officers in government agencies and departments and to head Commissions of Inquiry into one incident after another.”
It said this is a practice which “demonstrates its distrust for civilians albeit qualified to perform such functions in contradistinction to military personnel.” For President Granger, these criticisms are unnecessary. “These are human beings. These are people with skills.
They are not a separate breed of citizens. We can’t deprive them of their right if they have the talent, the experience, the qualifications,” he said, while stressing that when he assumed office there were 10 officers who had been appointed to civilian posts by the previous administration.
“I don’t discriminate against them and obviously Mr. Jagdeo and Mr. Ramotar didn’t discriminate against them because I inherited a large number of former military officers who had been appointed by the PPP administration,” he said, while advising that these former presidents should be asked why they appointed Major General Joe Singh to his present position, Colonel Chabilall Ramsarup to the Civil Defence Com-mission, (CDC), Colonel Brassington Reynolds as a judge and Colonel Jawahar Persaud as Accountant General.
“Nobody criticised them? Why should they criticise me?” the Head of State said, while noting that he could offer criticism of the previous administration’s decision to appoint to their Cabinet a former member of the Guyana Defence Force who had been dishonorably discharged.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s a black cat or white cat, if it catches the rat it’s a good cat. We want good cats,” the president said.
