On Friday October 9, the faces of eight seemingly relatively young men and women (the gender balance in the ‘picks’ was also noticeable) adorned the front page of the Stabroek News. The attendant headline indicated that these were the newest appointees to the position of Permanent Secretary in the Guyana Public Service. The announcement was striking for a few reasons. First, it is doubtful (and here one is subject to correction) that that number of Permanent Secretaries would ever before have been swept into office in one fell swoop. Here, one assumes that a corresponding number of PS’s would have had to make room, by way of retirement or otherwise, for the new appointees. There is, too, the likelihood that the appointment of the new Permanent Secretaries would have meant that some other senior Public Servants who may have been ‘in line’ for promotion may have been superseded. Assuming that this is in fact the case, where do those persons stand now.
All of this, of course, given the manner in which the Public Service has functioned in relatively recent years, is speculative.
As a not unrelated aside we dwell, albeit briefly, on what is a fairly widespread belief that, over the years, the quality of service provided by the Guyana Public Service has diminished considerably. Further, it is widely believed that one of the primary reasons for what is believed to be the institution’s diminished efficiency has to do with the disfiguring interventions which the institution has had to endure at the hands of successive political administrations. One notes, for example, that the role of the Public Service Commission in matters of appointments to senior positions in the Public Service appears to have long become subsumed beneath the will of the political powers that be. Here, we will do no more than challenge the right of political administrations that are themselves largely responsible for the extant deformities in the Public Service to turn around and criticize the quality of the service which it provides these days. There is nothing democratic in political practices that either imprison or otherwise render largely impotent key and critical state institutions, the Public Service being one of those.
To return to the matter of the eight new Permanent Secretaries, it is not the fact of their appointments, per se, that is at issue here. It is the manner in which it has been executed insofar as that manner is reflective of what has become the commonplace propensity of politicians to thumb their noses at the institution of the Public Service Commission in making appointments to key and critical Public Service positions. It is, to put it crudely, a means of exerting a crude grip on key and critical state machinery. It is decidedly inconsistent with democratic practice.
A related story in the same issue of the Stabroek News (Eight new Permanent Secretaries appointed: Stabroek News: Page 3 Friday October 9, 2020) puts this issue into perspective, pointing unerringly to what are, in fact, shockingly glaring irregularities in the manner in which the appointments appear to have been executed. Whatever else we may be led to think it amounts to a politically driven changing of the guard at a critical level of the Public Service. It is not in keeping with either a regard for important institutions of the state nor, one might add, is it an example of democratic behaviour. As political behaviour goes in Guyana, it is more of the same.
Public Servants of three or four decades ago and Public Service ‘watchers’ of the same era would recall that ‘back in the day,’ Permanent Secretaries bestrode the Public Service like towering colossuses. They were the unquestioned captains of their vessels, having ‘earned their corn’ by working their way relentlessly through the ranks, poring over the circulars and memoranda that were, in effect their operating manual, attending countless training sessions and taking a lesson from each of their many profound experiences. All of these attributes, at one time or another, had to be deployed in the execution of one or another of their day-to-day pursuits. Accordingly, their formidable reputations derived from years of practical, hands-on experience and service of a high quality. It took time and application to fashion their respective storehouses of institutional knowledge. Those are the attributes through which they secured preferment and which served as their credentials. By the time that they had come to sit in the Permanent Secretary’s chair the appointees to the position had possessed ‘a plaster for every sore.’
Mind you, one is mindful not to insinuate, even in the slightest, that Permanent Secretaries of the contemporary era, including our eight recent appointees, are of a lesser intellectual ilk than their predecessors. The reportage in the Stabroek News suggests that many of them bring considerable academic credentials to the table. But that is hardly the point. It was then, and still is, a matter of who possessed the credentials that had to do with the requirements of being a PS. In this regard some of them are pretty ‘green’ appointees.
There was a time when arrival at the point of becoming a Permanent Secretary used to be preceded by a demanding journey. It was a question of both a comprehensive knowledge of the rules governing the running of a Ministry as well as the ability to effectively interpret and apply those rules. This is the glue that has held the Public Service together.
Contextually, as the story that appears in the Friday October 9th issue of the Stabroek News points out, while the announcement of the appointments of the ‘favoured eight’ was made directly by the Office of the President, the circumvention of the provision of the Constitution that empowers the Public Service Commission remains unexplained That is unacceptable.
Some of the new Permanent Secretary appointees are coming to their appointments either from relatively junior Public Service positions or else, from no experience in the service. This raises the question as to whether a consummate knowledge of the requirements necessary to function effectively in the position of Permanent Secretary is an expected requisite here or whether what we are witnessing is not simply part of the revolving door syndrome that characterizes the changes in political administration. As long as the constitutional prerogative of the Public Service Commission to make these appointments continues to be circumvented one might justifiably inquire as to whether the means by which such preferment is executed does not, ultimately, diminish the standing of the office itself.
