President David Granger says that public servants must upgrade their training continuously if they are to remain relevant to the new emerging economy and that trade unions have a responsibility in this process.
He was speaking at the opening of the 23rd Biennial Congress of the 96-year-old Guyana Public Service Union (GPSU) held at the Baridi Benab, State House on September 25.
The President, who is functioning in a caretaker capacity prior to fresh general elections, spoke of change and the need for adaptation as necessary for survival. He noted that change was taking place rapidly and transforming the nature of the workplace so that workers who are not prepared for the continuous changes in the field and office could find their careers retarded and their service redundant.
Granger noted that technological change especially through automation and information communication technology brings both opportunity and uncertainty and has spawned new jobs. However, he added, this change has also caused redundancies and loss of jobs and therefore sees the transformation of labour as “the inevitable consequence of these changing times that labour has to change to keep abreast with the times and the market place.”
According to the President, the modern public service demands competent, proficient and versatile workers capable of adapting to changing technologies. He noted that while the Public Service has created jobs for highly-skilled persons, it has also displaced low-skilled employees, making it obvious that to survive, “employees have to become more highly-skilled even after they have commenced their service.”
He spoke of young school leavers in the middle of the last century who could aspire to join the civil service at the entry-level and climb the rungs of the civil service hierarchy, benefitting, along the way, from the retirement or death of those at the top. However, he reminded his audience that the Public Service “has changed since those slow, sluggish days,” and has evolved into a more complex network of agencies, departments and Ministries offering a variety of services to wider urban, rural, hinterland and even international communities in terms of the Foreign Service. He added that it has become “more competitive and the people who acquire new skills [and] can perform better than their colleagues, will move further, faster.”
The President referred to the situation that obtained in 2015 where cadets could enter the Public Service “without an adequate understanding of the external and internal environments in which they were required to function and sometimes without a full appreciation of the complexity of this country to which we belong – its history, geography, its demography, laws, governmental structure and the systems and regulations of public administration.”
He bemoaned the fact that many school leavers were unprepared for the complexity of work within the Guyana Public Service and therefore require additional training to be able to deliver services across the country’s ten administrative regions. He disclosed that this was the justification for the establishment of the Bertram Collins College of the Public Service, in order that “those entering the public service were equipped with a deeper understanding of the nature of the public administration in this complex country.” He reassured those present that the College is overcoming its early teething problems and is working to enhance the competencies of cadets so that when they join their respective ministries and departments, they could deliver efficient public services.
President Granger spoke on the transformation of the Public Service, both horizontally and vertically and the need for it to be “extended and expanded,” increasingly to the hinterland regions at the same time emphasising that Public Servants must be prepared to leave the coastland and serve in the hinterland. He informed of the Government’s plans to erase the differences between the “huge” hinterland west of the Essequibo and that part of Guyana, the “smaller” part of Guyana, east of the Essequibo. “The Essequibo River, 1,000 kilometres long unfortunately, traditionally, has divided our country developmentally, in two and to the west of the Essequibo, the infrastructure, the services are not on par with some of the services and infrastructure, east of the Essequibo. We don’t want to erase the river, but we want to erase the inequality and the division.”
He noted that by 2015, there were “gross” inequalities between hinterland and coastland and sometimes between rural and urban areas. And to further illustrate this observation, he gave as an example, the case of a person wanting to register a business in Lethem in the Rupununi, “incredibly” having to travel the more than 450 kilometres to Anna Regina in the Pomeroon-Supenaam Region to do so.
The President spoke of the need to structurally eliminate inequality. “We shall build a nation of strong regions. Each region will have its own capital town which will drive its development. Each capital town will become a hub for the provision of services to the public.” The Government, he said, plans to extend the Public Service and expand it outwards and referred to the creation of four new towns – Bartica, in Cuyuni-Mazaruni; Mahdia in Potaro-Siparuni; Lethem, in the Rupununi; and Mabaruma, in the Barima-Waini Region, all of which have been established to drive the development of their respective regions, including by improving the access to public services. He emphasised that public servants must be prepared to leave Georgetown and to go into Bartica and the other new towns, just as they are moved from Kingston to Cummingsburg or to Queenstown. “They are all part of Guyana and public servants must be prepared to serve everywhere.”
He touched on the vertical improvement of the Public Service, noting that it is being reconfigured to better regulate the country’s economic sectors – including the natural resources and telecommunications sector – and to protect the environment. He also noted that Guyana’s economy is undergoing transformational change and the transformation will quicken in the years after 2020, therefore the Public Service, in the discharge of its regulatory role, will require more specialised and highly-skilled public servants.
Therefore the cadets entering the public service, the President stressed, “must possess the requisite agility and versatility to work not only in every part of the country but also in a competitive and digitized environment against younger and better educated Cadets, who will continue to enter the service.” He added that workers would need improved training to adapt to this environment and called on the unions, particularly the GPSU, to assist by helping its members to adapt to the changes and to ensure that the workforce is better educated in order to play a meaningful role in the delivery of services.
