The sense one gets from President Irfaan Ali’s recent 5:30 am meeting with Ministers and some senior Public Servants is that he seeking to send a message that there are mechanisms within aspects of the government’s machinery that are, at the least, creaking at the hinges, and that he is seeking to send a boisterous message to those state functionaries of his unhappiness with the performances of some key institutions of government and that he is seeking significant changes in the modus operandi of those aspects of the operational side of the governance process.
The fact is that the Guyanese society is almost always dripping with cynicism, particularly whenever radical changes are made to those aspects of the governance process so that, according to reports, when the gates of State House were closed to those ‘invitees’ who turned up after (5:30 am) it was intended to send a wider message regarding the importance/ urgency of the summons, and much more to the point, that the fore day morning timing of the summons may well have been intended to send a message, both to the invitees and to the public, as a whole, that this was no gimmick. The problem here is that when the arch cynical outlook of many Guyanese is taken into account it would have made little difference if the meeting was held at a generally more pleasing hour.
Here it seemed that the planners of the meeting would not have taken any great account of the sheer cynicism of the Guyanese people. In essence, some of the aspects of the President’s summons, not least the locking out of the latecomers, would almost certainly have come across to onlookers as pure theatre. The fact of the matter is that, whether we like it or not, the audiences here have long learnt to recognize what they consider to be the fault lines in the governance process to separate what they consider to be serious governance-related initiatives from what one might call political gimmicks. Here, it can hardly be denied that there were aspects of the (governance) process that came across as pure theatre.
It is clear that outside the actual participants at the President’s meeting the objective behind the early morning gathering was to send a message to the populace, as a whole, that aspects of the operating machinery were not working as they should and that some of the functionaries positioned at the helm of those operations may well be sound asleep at the wheel, or otherwise, taken up with other preoccupations. Here, it should be said that while the President’s early morning summons may have meant well, it could well have been approached differently. Surely, for example, we have long reached a point of ‘calling out’ ministerial and administrative functionaries who are deficient in the execution of their duties and where there might be, in the circumstances, a more effective way of going about seeking to find solutions to the problem.
Here it has to be said that however much we skirt around the issue there are generous measures of incompetence, indifference and distraction in some areas of the state machinery and until those are identified and rooted out the practice of inattention to the various critical aspects of the diligent and dedicated execution of the responsibilities of the state will continue to be compromised. While the President’s meeting and message sought to disseminate that the system is far from ‘firing on all cylinders’, the question that arises – given what appears to have been the reason behind the summoning of the recent meeting – is whether or not the meeting will secure the outcomes that the President appears to be seeking. But two things are clear here: first, that the President’s concerns would appear to be targeting his ‘high end’ political and administrative functionaries, and secondly, it now seems that he has decided that he now has to extend himself to excessive lengths to have some aspects of his administration’s policies effected to the extent of his expectations.
Whether the recent ‘fore day morning’ meeting was the correct approach to securing a remedy is doubtful. If things are to turn around there is going to have to be a much more targeted exercise of holding the feet of those to whom responsibility is assigned to the proverbial fire.
