Dear Editor,
I did not want to write again this week, my writing now is just to keep my research and my writing skills up to date for 2025. I was waiting for some repudiation of the view that Permanent Secretaries [PSs] in the Westminster system can be political. Not seeing any, I am forced to again explain our system to your readers. In the Westminster model of government, the Permanent Secretary is the administrative head of a department or ministry. The following was lifted from www.thecommonwealthilibrary.org/index.php/comsec/catalog/download/719/719/5440?inline
“The Permanent Secretaries are “permanent” in the sense that they are normally career civil servants who have tenure beyond the life of any government. This system, in which the permanent public service extends to the topmost levels of public administration, is one of the defining characteristics of the Westminster model. It answers the need to balance administrative continuity, without which governing is unpredictable and difficult, against political sensitivity, which is the basis of democracy. Commonwealth countries are not unique in making this sharp distinction between ebb and flow at the political level and continuity at the administrative level.”
“It is also a characteristic of the French system, for example. But it does stand in sharp contrast to the practice of many other countries – the U.S.A. and Mexico, to take two examples — in which every change in elected government leads to sweeping changes in personnel at many levels of public administration. The most significant characteristic of the permanent secretary’s role is without doubt his or her position at the juncture of the political level of government and the public service level. Different observers use different terms: interpreter, translator, buffer, interface, funnel. However, they all describe the same situation: the permanent secretary is inescapably caught between the partisan political world of the minister and the rational, impartial and scientific world of the public servant.”
Editor, as amazed as I am as to why I am forced to write this again, the situation is very disturbing, and so am I. If the PSs were political then with any incoming government they would ALL have to be fired, as happens in the US, where the new President brings in all new secretaries, and why there is a long handing over period of nearly four months, between elections in November and the new government in January the next year. That system sees the politically appointed secretaries as being very knowledgeable in their appointed department of government, ours does not see that. Our PSs are permanent public service employees, so we can’t fire them every time we change government. The ministers are not supposed to usurp the function of the PSs and try to make all the decisions as we see happening here. This is why nothing is working, they are picking political hacks to be ministers and that’s OK, but then the ministers believe that they are the main decision makers in the ministries, and it leads to disaster.
And I would like to remind the public that when the Coalition administration [2015 to 2020] announced its intention to reshuffle their PSs, I wrote and criticized that plan as being completely insane. In keeping with the Westminster model, putting PSs into ministries in which they have no institutional knowledge or experience would be pure insanity. Shuffle the ministers by all means, but not the PSs. Editor, it’s getting bad here, so that perhaps each party should publish their cabinet before an election so that the public can get a glimpse of how much trouble they will be in if they vote for that party.
What has evolved here is not the Westminster system, it’s the ‘West Indies minister system’, since I see hints of it in Trinidad as well. But that doesn’t make it right. In Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and India the Westminster system is perhaps the most popular system, and its working. But in Trinidad, like Guyana, where the Indo and Afro Trinidadians vote along racial lines, it’s not so pervasive since the Trinidadians have a large middle and upper class, they demand good governance which acts as a control against the absolute nonsense we have here parading as governance. Our entire middle and upper classes, including our most educated citizens, have all migrated from this country.
When I was in college, in Trinidad, in the late 50’s early 60’s, Guyana had 600,000 people, and Trinidad had 800,000 persons [approx.]. Today, Trinidad has 1.4 million and we have 800,000 – that’s the level of migration which our obnoxious politics, since the 60s, has done to our country. It is completely incomprehensible how any senior member of our government, based almost entirely on the Westminster system, cannot understand the undesirability of the PSs being politically aligned.
Sincerely,
Tony Vieira
