Dear Editor,
As your paper reported, Ministers are encountering bloated payrolls under the previous regime for no-show jobs costing taxpayers billions of dollars annually while sugar workers and Amerindians were terminated from productive employment and rice farmers could not get promised prices. In most cases, the appointees have no skills in the field for which they were hired. One was in the health sector but knows nothing about the field. Another was at Bank of Guyana but knows nothing about finance or economics. The predecessor government abused the nation’s purse. It was repulsive political and economic behaviour, and such action must be condemned and not forgotten.
In the field of Economics, such practice is called featherbedding and or sinecure appointments – putting on the payroll friends, families, and party members with non-existent high paying jobs. Those of us who study or taught economics would understand how ‘political featherbedding’ and ‘sinecure appointments’ work. Featherbedding is generally the practice of having more workers than actually needed in a department “to provide pointless jobs for the boys”. It is ‘make work’ used as a means to reward higher or mid-level political supporters. Lower rung staff that actually perform don’t get such super salaries. It has virtually nothing to do with competence or performance. But not all featherbedding is bad and it is encouraged to retain workers on payroll especially when a company has surplus profit. It hurts to terminate workers. Companies may keep workers on the payroll finding odd jobs for them because their skills may be needed later.
A sinecure position is one where a person is appointed requiring little or no work but provided a large salary. It is virtually giving away free money to someone without any skill in the field and out of loyalty. Sinecures and featherbedding appointees can’t claim they were advisors or consultants, both of whose service a company or government may utilize in legitimate contracts on account of professional skills and competence.
In the case of the previous government, the political featherbedding and sinecure appointees were complete newcomers with ‘big’ titles, and they did virtually nothing for their pay. Most were looters raping the treasury. They lacked skills in the fields where hired. They did not even write or implement a report and some were not even present in Guyana. Some received over $1M month. And such wasteful expenditures were made by the regime that said it had no money and had to close sugar estates and could not afford to subsidize rice farmers or give raises to government workers. Yet $1Billion was spent monthly on featherbedding or no show jobs for the boys. It was collecting money through fraud. And these characters want to continue to hold on to those non-existent jobs while genuine workers were/are on the breadline.
Non-performing, no-show, party loyalty jobs for the boys (political loyalists) must immediately be terminated. Moreover, an effort must be made to recover the money paid over the last five years and criminal charges filed. Courts would be sympathetic to recover such fraudulent payrolls and make examples of them. And the population would support moves to recover loot.
Yours faithfully,
Dr Vishnu Bisram
