Our Constitution is long and complicated, and while we now have a Constitution Reform Commission in place, there has been little public discussion of what citizens consider needs to change. Even fairly well-informed persons are not that familiar with the details of our charter, and what they customarily make reference to are its aspirational sections, which are unimplementable unless expressed in the form of viable provisions in ordinary legislation.
With the exception of a reference to electoral reforms, the terms of reference for the Commission itself tend to fall into the aspirational category, covering the fundamental rights and freedoms of all Guyanese, the rights of women, children and Indigenous people, improving race relations and promoting ethnic security and equal opportunity. In addition the Commission is tasked with ensuring that the views of minorities in the decision-making process and in the conduct of government are given due consideration. When in office the government has shown little interest in meaningful reform, and it is likely that it is quite happy with the Constitution as it stands. Adding a few more aspirational sections as opposed to real revision, therefore, will be neither here nor there from its point of view.
A few items have come up for comment in the wider society, such as the list system, although that hardly needs to be addressed constitutionally, since it would more properly be dealt with by an amendment to the Representation of the People Act. There has been some comment on the President, both as regards his immunity and his powers, but there have been no recent calls for any major reform of the system as a whole, although some were raised at a much earlier stage.
Even if citizens are not too engaged with the topic of the Constitution at the moment, once in a while an event occurs which brings some aspect of it indirectly to public attention. And this is exactly what happened last week when Ms Mae Toussaint Jr Thomas-Meerabux was named by US agencies in connection with corruption. Her name had come to notice last year when she was questioned by Customs and Border Protection at Miami airport, had her phone taken, and two days later her visa withdrawn. She was at the time the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Home Affairs.
It does not appear to have caused the government too much angst, and although she was transferred to the Ministry of Labour, that did not occur until four months later, when the reassignment could be submerged in a major reshuffle of permanent secretaries. She was detained for what was called a secondary inspection when she was en route to China on a PPP scholarship, although to this day the public has not been told what that involved, or who the other delegates who accompanied her were.
The point is that as well as being PS in a highly sensitive ministry from a security point of view, she was also active in the PPP. And where that was concerned, this year she was elected as a non-voting member of the party’s Central Committee. She has now resigned. PPP General Secretary Bharrat Jagdeo described her resignation from the party as a hard blow, because she was one of the hardest workers on the team as could be seen from her efforts during the 2020 election and afterwards. “This is a hard thing because she is a tough worker,” he was quoted as saying.” Those people who know her in the party know how hard she worked in the party.”
This has probably come as a surprise to most people, who will have been wondering what a public servant, the Chief Accounting Officer for her ministry and responsible for all the other public servants in Home Affairs, was doing ‘working hard’ for the ruling party, and being sent on a party scholarship to China. What did she learn there in a system so far removed from our own, and why did she leave her government duties to attend a party course of all things?
Everyone knows what the ideal is: namely, that the public service should be professional, impartial and above all, politically neutral. Permanent Secre-taries are there to carry out a minister’s policy and manage the day-to-day affairs of their ministry, and in the traditional Westminster system they would do that no matter which party was in office. This allowed for continuity in government, and provided the institutional memory so necessary for rational administration. However, in this regard the traditional Westminster system was abandoned here long ago, and permanent secretaries come and go in an endless round of political musical chairs.
Which brings us to the crux of the matter, and that is a fundamental inconsistency in the Constitu-tion. The marginal caption for Section 38G reads: “Public Service to be free from political influence.” The first two clauses read: “(1) The integrity of the public service is guaranteed. No public officer shall be required to execute or condone irregular acts on the basis of higher orders
“(2) The freedom of every public officer to perform his or her duties and fulfil his or her responsibilities is protected.”
If all this sounds quite acceptable, the curious should roll their eye down to Section 205 which deals with the power of the President to make appointments and remove from office specified officials. And included in the list under clause (3) are permanent secretaries. All that can be said is that this particular presidential power makes nonsense of a public service “free from political influence” as the Constitution phrases it.
In one of his Accountability Watch columns dealing with permanent secretaries, Mr Anand Goolsarran also drew parallels with the Regional Executive Officers, who are appointed by the Minister of Local Government rather than the President. But the problem is similar. It might be added that they are political appointees charged with carrying out the policy of the democratically elected Regional Democratic Councils, leading to especial problems in opposition held regions like Ten.
While an almost total silence about constitutional reform seems to have enveloped the nation, perhaps the incident involving Ms Thomas-Meerabux will have woken up a few of our lawyers, politicians and sagacious members of the public who will now apply their minds to our foundation document. And for those who are concerned about excessive presidential powers, they should not omit Section 205 (3) from their list. Permanent secretaries, like the rest of the public service should come under the Public Service Commission, not the President, and should not be allowed to express themselves politically.
