Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo yesterday asserted that Permanent Secretaries (PS) can be members of political parties.
Jagdeo’s position comes against the backdrop of concerns raised about the presence of Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Education, Shannielle Hoosein-Outar who was seen clad in a red outfit at the recently-held People’s Progressive Party (PPP) Congress. Jagdeo made it clear yesterday that the PS is indeed a member of the party and that is her democratic right.
Although Permanent Secretaries are appointed by the President, there have been lingering concerns that the PPP/C ad-ministration’s appointees are not career public servants but instead, party members who were parachuted into the position of Permanent Secretary.
“First of all let me make it clear that Permanent Secretaries are political appointees. They are appointed by the President of the country not the Public Service Commis-sion. The Public Service Commission appoints civil servants. Ministers and Permanent Secretaries are appointed by the President of the country. That is in the constitution of Guyana, we didn’t put that there,” Jagdeo said, as he condemned the Stabroek News’ May 13 Editorial – “Permanent Secretaries”.
He went on, “Secondly, people are free to practice… they are free to belong to a political party and not be discriminated against. That’s the freedom that we fight for. The freedom to freely express yourself, freedom of association that we have always fought for.”
While Permanent Secretaries are political appointees they are not expected to be members of political parties but career civil servants.
The editorial had pointed to attorney-at-law Darren Wade’s Facebook query about the presence of Hoosein-Outar at the just concluded PPP Congress.
It noted too that there was an immediate “clapback by the Minister of Education, Priya Manickchand, who aside from vitriol, asked why Mr Wade had targeted a public officer and not her.”
Manickchand also went on to explain that after the Congress “…we used the opportunity to determine for the participants of Regions 1, 7, 8 and 9 what might be issues affecting them in education that we could resolve. Because it is usually harder for those residents to reach us. The PS left her home on a holiday and was doing her job by recording and resolving those issues”.
Jagdeo said that this newspaper should have looked at the APNU+AFC’s firing of Permanent Secretaries during its five-year tenure.
“I thought that the Stabroek News would have looked at the ethnic cleansing that took place after APNU took office where almost all of the Indo Permanent Secretaries were removed,” he said.
He said that now, although the Permanent Secretaries are political appointees, they are not all of one race since “If you look at the ministries now you would see… people of every race being there.”
“We get criticized. Suddenly it is a return of paramountcy of the party. We did not force people to come to our congress where in the past the head of the army had to go to the congress and public servants. A circular would go out to say ‘we expect you to go to the congress’. We did not force any public servant to go to our congress. That would have been paramountcy of the party.
“Not because two persons who are members of this party but have a job in the government [are there] that is paramountcy of the party. It is just a jaundiced kind of analysis and it is something that we need to all condemn,” he added.
Consummate professionals
Last August, President Irfaan Ali announced a major reshuffling of permanent secretaries, just over three years after his government took office and after the resignation of former Minister of Local Government, Nigel Dharamlall, who was at that time at the centre of a rape probe.
There were two new Permanent Secretaries: Adele Diane Tricia Cole-Clarke to the Ministry of Legal Affairs, and Miguel Shaun Choo-Kang, former head of Regional Planning in the State Planning Unit of the Ministry of Finance, to the Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development.
The six Permanent Secretaries re-assigned were: Alfred Roland King, to the Office of the Prime Minister; Shannielle Hoosein-Outar, to the Ministry of Education; Prema Anastasia Roopnarine, to the Ministry of Human Services and Social Security; Bishram Kuppen, to the Ministry of Housing and Water; Andre Inshan Ally, to the Ministry of Home Affairs; and Mae Toussaint Jr. Thomas-Meerabux, to the Ministry of Labour.
Toussaint Jr. Thomas-Meerabux was last year engulfed in a controversy after it was revealed that her cellphone had been confiscated in Miami by US authorities and her visa later revoked. It is believed that this made her continued presence at the Home Affairs Ministry problematic.Two Sundays ago, she was elected at the PPP congress as a non-voting member of the Central Committee.
Jagdeo said that what should be assessed is if the Permanent Secretaries “perform tasks at their ministry, whether they do so in a partisan manner” and he can vouch that they do not.
“They are consummate professionals. They belong to a political party but they are professional too,” he stressed.
