That the former Director of the Government Analyst-Food and Drugs Department (GAFDD) Dr. Marlan Cole has been removed from his position as Head of one of the country’s more important regulatory institutions and one in which he had served for more than two decades, seemingly without performance-related reason, is reflective of a form of disregardful political behaviour with which we have become painfully familiar.
While we have long come to understand that in our Guyana it is the political caprices of those who rule rather than the integrity of the state that counts, there are some excesses that are, quite simply, decidedly risky, even hard to take. This, arguably, is one of those.
Dr. Cole’s eventual removal is, quite simply, one of those reminders that we in Guyana get from time to time that Public Servants holding sensitive positions walk thin lines; that their skills and their careers count for little if anything in the wider scheme of political things and that it is the political powers that be and not, necessarily, the people, that they must satisfy.
Those with insights into the nature of the relationship between the office of the GAFDD and the political powers that be can hardly pretend that Dr. Cole’s ‘demise’ was either sudden or shocking. It came in the wake of a protracted period of unease, with the now former Director of the institution trying to hold the line against transgressions of rules and procedures directly linked to the health and wellness of the nation. There had been, reportedly, run-ins with ‘the authorities’ over Cole’s attempts to veto excursions into officially sanctioned bending of the rules as favours to those deemed by the politicians to be suitably entitled to such favours. Cole understood, one feels, that to go down the road of creating what one might call an open sepulchre for exemptions would be to subscribe to a further disfigurement of what is already a weak and fragile nation where corruption thrives at the expense of the well-being of the powerless. There were too, presumably, considerations that had to do with his own professional integrity.
In a political system such as ours, you do not embark on such courses of action without, sooner or later, hitting a wall. It would seem, now, that the political administration has finally drawn a line under Dr. Cole’s pushback.
What one might call ‘the final curtain’ has been closed in the most bizarre and shameless of fashions; a summons to the office of the Ministry’s Permanent Secretary attended by a coarse, blunt notification that the bell had tolled and later, a printed missive that his remuneration would not be touched and that he had been reassigned to one of those hastily created ‘dead end’ occupational options that renders the ‘victim’ irrelevant.
Dr. Cole’s removal would have been studiously contemplated for some time. The plain fact is that he had become a serious inconvenience to individuals who sought to profit from being able to circumvent what the GAFDD stood for. Notification of his demise came, eventually, first, through a prior prickly verbal exchange with Mr. Malcolm Watkins, the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Health, a type of coarse ‘early warning’ that the bell had finally tolled. Afterwards, came a terse missive from Mr. Watkins directing that he effect “a seamless and comprehensive handover of the operations of the Government
Analyst-Food and Drug Department to Dr. Narine Singh, Chief Medical Officer (ag).”
Not only has Dr. Cole been removed from his position as guardian of a pillar that is critical to the nation’s well-being as a whole, the missive further assigns him one of those familiar convoluted alternative assignments reserved by the political powers that be for out-of-favour Public Servants put out to pasture, in this instance by a political administration which appears far too preoccupied with its alternative pursuits to stop to think about the extent of the disfigurement that it inflicts on a country as fragile as our own by compromising some of the very pillars that support it. It is a worrisome indication of the path on which it appears to have firmly set its feet.
