Dear Editor,
Some may say it’s hard to judge a book by its cover, but oftentimes after a few chapters it gets easier to get a feel for the story. It has been close to two years now that the Guyanese public has had a chance to read some of the chapters in the book ‘The Performance of the Minister of Youth Sport and Culture, Ms Nicolette Henry’. As the people delve deeper into this book, more and more f them are coming away asking the question, how on earth can such a person become a minister after exhibiting so much ignorance of her portfolio?
Is this a systemic problem? It can become a bit disconcerting to glance at the line-up in the cabinet room. One can easily conclude that the competent are clearly in the minority in the Granger cabinet. Of course, you have the likes of Carl Greenidge and Raphael Trotman, who can hold their own in any cabinet room, any day of the year because of their sound technical competence. But at the other end of the spectrum, you have the likes of Nicolette Henry who clearly seems incapable of differentiating between Phagwah and Deepavali. But if my memory serves me right, this is kind of stuff that I learned in primary school in the hard PNC days when students struggled to access textbooks. Today, I am told, all primary school students are learning this lesson from a textbook called Social Studies for Our Children Book 1.
I saw this video of the Minister’s performance and clearly if this was a Freudian slip, shame on no one; it is human to err. But after slipping once, it is clear from the video that the Minister remained clueless as to her error and pressed on. I could not believe my ears or my eyes as I watched the video. Like a programmed robot, the Minister continued to force her message down the throats of her audience even after they protested.
Where are her cultural intelligence (CQ) and cultural manners? It is our customs she was mashing up and these cultural norms in the Hindu community are not meaningless, otherwise they would not have been followed for centuries.
In the modern world according to the Harvard Business Review, CQ has become a vital aptitude and skills test for any executive before they are granted a job or promotion. But it seems that Presi-dent Granger was heavily engaged in a game of eenee-minee-minee-mo when he picked some of his 27 Cabinet members.
Anyone close to the dominant party in the coalition (the PNC) will tell you that a more suitable candidate for this role of Youth, Sports and Culture was PNC executive Mr Christopher Jones, who today has proven he is multiple time more culturally intelligent than Ms Nicolette Henry.
And when you consider this Minister gets paid close to a million dollars a month plus benefits to dish out such high-grade incompetence, you wonder where have the PNC minds like Shirley Field-Ridley have gone?
When you evaluate this situation by comparing performance v benefits, only words like public squandering and public waste appear to be the commonalities when it comes to some of the choices in the Granger cabinet. Shame on President Granger for diverting some $3 million per year from the Treasury, to send this Minister back to school to train in a field totally irrelevant to her current job. Isn’t this wanton abuse of the Treasury? Will SARA, SOCU and the police investigate this public squandering come 2021?
I call on President Granger to do right by the people and withdraw this portfolio from Nicolette Henry. She has proven herself unfit and unsuitable for this role. She has disrespected a significant portion of the population with her careless statements and has lost the right to lead the nation on the cultural front. If the Minister is busy studying healthcare on the job, to the point that she has become tardy at her work, then it is imperative for the President to act. For how long more will her cabinet colleagues have to carry such deadwood by covering up for these acts of under-performance and unpreparedness? What next to expect from this part-time Minister and full-time student?
Yours faithfully,
Sase Singh