Dear Editor,
One should congratulate the Guest Editorial appearing in Stabroek News published on February 7, 2023, titled `Decentralizing the presidency’. It is a scholarly analysis by the author and deserves our congratulations.
Further, it may as I have argued before be another well-intentioned initiative by President Dr. Irfaan Ali. However, for those who have studied human history and the Guyana political experience including our constitutional and other experiments over the last three odd generations, there is a very worrisome and serious aspect to this adventure of taking the capital government to the people.
What is seen evident is the application of, as we say, a bandage to a festering sore or giving a painkiller to a patient without attempting to find out the cause of the pain or sore and to tackle it skilfully. At the risk of being repetitive this can be the beginning of a dangerous descent and disentanglement of the essence of viable democracy.
We have seen this, four generations ago with the rise of a corporal to a chancellor and similar situations elsewhere. The beginning of these disastrous conditions is where we lose faith in our institutions such as security forces. Judiciary and the parliament.
Tackling the sore or pain with our substantial recently found financial resources is possible but requires careful planning, a commitment to the wholesomeness or oneness of Guyana. It requires statesmanship, boundless honesty, decency, and forgiveness on both sides of our political divide. If these characteristics are non-existent then this business of decentralizing the presidency to the people is eventually putting us on the slippery slope into a murky bottomless pit.
Listening to the statements from the President’s office, it is a deliberate or subtle attempt to disfigure the cherished institutions upon which a truly democratic state rests, a country of 83,000 sq miles and less than a million souls.
I have like others been part of an effort to decentralize Government, thereby taking government, and that is the presidency physically and emotionally closer to the people. That is the rationale even before Independence, for municipalities where a large number of citizens reside.
Today in addition to those we have ten Administrative Regions and I underline or underscore the word Administrative. The band-aid painkiller solution is what it is. What President Ali and his plethora of Advisors should be doing is to restore the Public Service to its position of pride and place of honour, staffed by educated persons appropriately trained with a sense of morality and who are to be proud that they are public servants, and here I include the military arm, the Fire Service, the Police and Prison branches of the public service, Teachers, Nurses and Medical Services.
When over time, we tinker, massage and manipulate the public service, you have the inefficiency, corruption and slothfulness evident today and which is a justifiable concern for all of us.
Let’s fix those things right – (1) In all these branches, reintroduce a Cadet Training Programme, which we had in the run up to Independence and this must include members of the public service who show an interest to study and learn, to be given every opportunity to climb to the top while serving with honour and dignity their particular discipline.
In some of the Caribbean Islands, I met Policemen who were qualified as Attorneys and Administrators who have University degrees in different disciplines. As an aside, I learnt at the funeral service for the late Snr. Supt Edmond Cooper, after gaining his law degree, additionally considered to be a very competent officer, his promotion was denied for extraneous reasons.
When you have this environment, you suffocate and frustrate those who wish to make their skill available to the public as professional public service. This is one example that speaks to the problem that exists today throughout the length and breadth of the ten Administrative Regions.
Second, if you have a well-trained, honest and this means non-corruptible staff, everywhere where citizens dwell and do business with government, you solve the problem alluded to in the Guest Editorial of Tuesday, February 7, 2023.
If we spend the massive sums we now have on an educational system so that our youngsters are given opportunities irrespective of race, colour, creed, place of birth or perceived political allegiance to allow them to release their creative energies in the service of citizen to serve the people from Pakaraima’s peaks of power to Corentyne lush sands, we will have an wholesome and better country served by a cadre of young men and women who we can then label as professional public servants, professional soldiers, professional policemen, professional teachers, professional nurses, professional administrators, etc.
For the purpose of this letter, the public servant includes a judiciary that can truly and effectively hold the balance of the scales of justice in our country. The Judiciary is one of the three key branches of government. We ought not to have a judiciary headed by two persons unconfirmed for so many years and where persons have gone to their graves with receiving neither justice nor decisions from a tired and tedious judiciary
I listened to some of the debates in Parliament recently and was appalled that scant regard is given to the pleadings and questions by the Opposition. So long as incompetence, corruption and square political pegs in round holes are allowed to flourish these sorties or rather excursions by the President into the various parts of the country may be deemed necessary but woefully inadequate to address the concerns and deeper issues that affect residents everywhere.
Speaking about another area is the emancipation of the truth. Speaking to two youngsters over the weekend, they said they were glad to know that at last, their words not mine, the GDF will get aircraft. As youngsters in the army, their ambition is to be a Pilot.
Here again, we need a system where the truth is available to be passed on from one generation to the next. I reminded the two youngsters that they should not use the word ‘at last,’ in relation to the army and aircraft, since at one time, the army was equipped with a cadre of well-trained pilots and engineers.
These vessels and aircraft, apart from security reasons, gave Ministers, government officials and others the capability to go to remote areas and vice versa and to bring residents to the centres where necessary.
Before we had this abundance of cash, we had at one time two Russian made MI8 helicopters, capable of lifting heavy equipment, Two Bell 206, Two Bell 212, One Bell 412, Two Alouette, Six Britten Norman Highlander,(fixed wing aircraft) Three Skyvans. And one executive type Beechcraft, all flown by officers of the GDF Air Corps.
Boats – Roy Blackman was the chief navigator who brought the vessel, named PICARI from England to Guyana and there were six support vessels at the time.
To the young and old, let us take comfort in the words of Meas ‘Truth is truth to the end of reckoning.’
Let us have the courage and good sense to source and cure the pain since the band-aid and painkiller offers no more than a temporary relief. We need to cure our ills so that we will bequeath to our children and their children of Guyana that is great, united and free.
Yours faithfully,
Hamilton Green