The contract employee debate that surfaced some weeks ago and which is still ensuing in some quarters has raised some interesting questions about the prospects for a professional public service in the future. Equally interesting is the fact that the discourse has been ensuing even as we await the outcomes of the Commission of Inquiry into the Public Service ordered by President David Granger and which, in its outcomes, is likely to address the issue of contract employment in the public service.
The issue of contract employment at the level of the CoI appears to have arisen against the backdrop of concerns ‒ legitimate ones – about the growing propensity for circumventing the established channels for the recruitment of public servants that inhere in the procedures of the Public Service Commission (PSC). It is widely felt – and here again there are valid arguments – that contracts have served to erode the concept of neutrality that one associates with the public service and have compromised public service values like professionalism and integrity.
That being said, in a country like ours where there is a scarcity of some specialized skills, the occasion is bound to arise when the accustomed procedures for recruitment to the public service will have to be gotten around in order to hire adequately qualified persons. A corollary to that, of course, is that where skills are scarce, those scarce skills are going to have to be compensated at rates that are a cut (several cuts, actually) above the regular public service offerings. That being said, of course, it is still highly desirable that we at least seek to fashion predictable mechanisms for addressing what one might call those anomalous situations.
Accepting that reality and, for the time being, leaving that particular issue aside, there was something farcical about the recent cat-sparring between the government and the political opposition about numbers and the justifications for contract employees in the respective administrations. Whereas, as has already been stated, there would probably always be justification for deviation from public service recruitment procedures in order to meet particular human resource needs; contract recruitment has long been a form of currency with which to settle political favours and has been generously utilized whenever a new administration has entered office. Jobs for the faithful is one of the common forms of political payback, and issues of whether or not qualifications match public service criteria are seen by the political directorate, in many instances, as getting in the way of political expediency.
One of the more interesting discourses that arose out of the hearings of the Public Service Commission of Inquiry had to do with the concept of the neutrality of the public service and how contract employment skews loyalty and undermines neutrality. Much of the discourse laid bare a general uneasiness (even amongst those public servants, including Permanent Secretaries who, themselves, are contracted employees) over the potential impact of contracts on neutrality. Indeed, the point was made during one of the hearings that, under the previous administration, permanent secretaries, by virtue of their contractual arrangements, considered themselves answerable to the then Head of the Presidential Secretariat, a senior political figure in the system. In some cases, too, the assumption is that under the new dispensation permanent secretaries are answerable to the Minister of State who, in all but title, has replaced the former HPS.
Some of the exchanges between the CoI commissioners and the permanent secretaries who gave evidence would appear to suggest that the commission is likely to take a strong line on the issue of a neutral public service and the neutrality of permanent secretaries. Indeed, what we may well find is that, among other things, the CoI’s recommendations might seek to steer us in the direction of a strictly neutral, strictly professional public service, where permanent secretaries, for example, are answerable to a Head of the Public Service whose credentials in terms of seniority, competence, professionalism and neutrality are beyond question., If that happens it would be interesting to see how the political administration will respond.
