An unacceptable indiscretion

Even if we debate the matter of just how deserving of a salary increase our ministers are till the proverbial cows come home, differences of opinion on the issue will remain. There are those who would say that even when the announced increases are taken into account our ministers are still nowhere near being adequately compensated when the cost of living is considered. That being said there are others who would argue that the cost of living consideration applies in even greater measure to our public servants and our teachers, among others, and that the real question that arises has to do with where the more immediate need for a salary increase lies.

One assumes – and it is an entirely reasonable assumption to make – that setting aside the substantive decision on the salary increases for its ministers, the administration would have given some thought to how it would ‘sell’ the decision to the populace, since it would have known that a decision by a government not yet six months old to afford its ministers a 50 per cent salary hike was bound to be questioned, even challenged, in some quarters. The need to think through and manage the public dissemination of information in this instance was not, it seems, thought through particularly carefully, and now even the government cannot honestly deny that the whole thing has blown up, so to speak, in its face.

How deserving the salary increase is and whether or not the government, in the face of the huge banana skin on which it has landed should allow it to stand anyway, have already been ventilated elsewhere. This editorial is more concerned with what has turned out to be the administration’s squandering of some of what, arguably, is its most important and not limitless resource, its public image or public goodwill. The manner in which, on this particular matter, it appeared to take its own supporters and the populace as a whole for granted, cannot be allowed to pass without comment since it constitutes an important lesson from which it should seek to learn.

As has already been said, one only has to set the timing of the announcement against the backdrop of the various other competing political promises and public expectations including, as was mentioned earlier, paying meaningful increases to public servants and teachers, most of whom are confronted with levels of privation that are a good deal worse than the circumstances facing ministers, to see how awkward the timing was. It was, in truth, an unfathomable piece of bad judgment.

Nowhere, arguably, was the evidence of that failure to properly manage the dissemination of information on the salary hike more evident than in the ugly rush of blood by Minister of State Joseph Harmon when a solicited response on the matter provoked a comment sufficiently rash, dismissive and arrogant as to significantly raise the temperature of public discourse in the matter. Indeed, if Mr Harmon, in the future, is to make a fist of what now appears to be one of his permanent roles as the voice of authority as far as the dissemination of official information is concerned, then he must not only be made to see the wisdom of withdrawing those remarks but of being a good deal more measured and contemplative in his public comments on sensitive issues in the future.

Here is some of what Mr Harmon had to say on the issue of ministerial salary increases. “I’m not going to make any apologies whatsoever for ministers getting an increase in salaries, they deserve it…The salary of a minister, a senior minister, is five hundred and sixty something thousand a month. That is money I paid to one of my attorneys that works for me when I was in private practice. Why should I be working for that?”

What absolute insensitivity and aloofness! Mr Harmon’s views on what he thinks himself and his ministerial colleagues are worth surely does not entitle him to extend his public comments into the realm of arrogance. As for the implied comparison between what he paid “one of my attorneys” in his law practice and what ministers get, it was the Guyana Trades Union Congress General Secretary Lincoln Lewis who made the point elsewhere that salary level expectations ought not to be the same in the public sector as they are in the private sector, a point which Mr Harmon set aside completely in mustering his own comment.

The problem here reposes in the fact that remarks like those made by Mr Harmon can go beyond affecting his own public image as a high-ranking official spokesperson; they can interfere with such public goodwill as the political administration still enjoys. The government can hardly pretend not to have known that the disclosure of a salary increase ‒ a significant one, at that ‒ for ministers at this time, earlier assurances to the contrary notwithstanding, would have set tongues wagging even amongst its own supporters. More than that, public responses suggest that the substantive misjudgment was considerably compounded by what Mr Harmon had to say on the matter. To many it would have felt like adding insult to injury, and if it is allowed to pass without at least some official expression of regret, that would amount to squandering a generous helping of that public goodwill which the government may well need to access at another time and in another situation, sooner or later. A case unquestionably exists here for a measure of damage limitation and it should include an expression of regret for Mr Harmon’s considerable indiscretion.