The Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association (GMSA), in its media release of Friday January 14, is calling on the Minister of Health to use his authority “to ensure the compliance of rules, regulations, and standards and to empower the Government Analyst-Food and Drug Department (GA-FDD) to so do.” No one, of course, can reasonably quarrel with the GMSA for seeking to ensure that its members benefit from the best possible service that the GA-FDD can offer though the question that arises here is whether it is not the rules and regulations themselves, rather than ‘the Minister,” that ought to empower the GA-FDD in the pursuit of its functions.
The GMSA, after all, must surely be aware of the debilitating role which ministerial control/ prerogative/intervention continues to play in the political usurpation of the authority of what ought, correctly, to be rules-driven regulatory institutions armed with the requisite autonomy to do its work professionally and in accordance with laid down rules and procedures.
The GMSA appears to sculpt some of its prevailing concerns with the performance of GA-FDD around what it says is “a seeming lack of leadership as a result of the Director’s absence.” If this is indeed the case then surely it speaks to a structural problem that can only be remedied by ensuring that matters pertaining to issues like succession and deputizing are comprehensively attended to in order to resolve challenges associated with deputizing and succession.
Historical experience has unquestionably borne out the reality that political control of our regulatory agencies have caused them to become instruments of ‘legitimization’ for what are frequently downright improper directives, which is what, not a few observers would contend, is what the GA-FDD has had to contend with over many years. When our key regulatory agencies – like the GA-FDD – come to be governed largely by political fiat rather than by rules that leave no room for intermittent, sometimes whimsical bending and distortion, then those agencies become malleable, dysfunctional. As an aside it has to be said that the GA-FDD is not the only important state institution that has become infected in this regard.
That the GA-FDD finds itself, today, in a worryingly debilitated state is not a matter in question. Its considerable loss of rules-driven direction in some of its decision-making in matters that have to do, overwhelmingly, with issues of public safety and overall national health and wellness, ought correctly to be a matter of significant official concern. Instead, the GA-FDD continues to be a target for officially sanctioned directives that sometimes seek exemptions and waivers that are not only irregular but which could blow up in the Department’s face, both locally and abroad, thereby hopelessly compromising the very purpose for its existence.
The question which, not for the first time, arises here, is whether, in the matter of the key and critical decisions which the GA-FDD is frequently required to make, there should exist prerogative for intermittent political intervention for the purpose of facilitating favours. Should government not, at this juncture, be pursuing, with due haste, the fast-tracking of corrective procedures that can infuse into the Department a far higher level of professionalism as well as a sense of national purpose?
The work of an already debilitated GA-FDD becomes doubly difficult when it must forever be prepared to acquiesce to political directives for waivers and exemptions that hopelessly undermine its substantive mission. Here, there is room for reflection on the part which the private sector sometimes plays in eroding the integrity of the GA-FDD. If there can be no legitimate quarrel with urgings from the private sector that the GA-FDD discharge its responsibilities fairly and efficiently, it can hardly be denied that sporadic individual resort by business entities to requests for circumvention of GA-FDD rules and regulations should also be clearly, unequivocally sanctioned by our Business Support Organisations (BSOs). Where our BSOs cannot, manifestly, be seen as part of the solution they will inevitably be regarded as part of the problem.
In the final analysis, however, it is for the political leadership of the country to place its clear and unmistakable veto on the existing prerogative of state institutions and state functionaries to intervene to enable the bending or setting aside of legitimate rules and regulations by pressing the clout which it unmistakably possesses into service.
