Given the wide-ranging nature of the brief handed the Commission of Inquiry into the Guyana Public Service by President David Granger last year it is a marvel that its work has been completed and its findings handed over in what, contextually, is a relatively short space of time. The mandate of the CoI, according to its Terms of Reference was to inquire into, report on, and make recommendations on the role, functions, recruitment process, remuneration and conditions of service for public servants. That, by any stretch of the imagination, was a tall order given the amount of ground that the CoI was required to cover and the vast body of material which it had to receive both in the form of verbal evidence from witnesses, locally, at the Public Service Department of the Ministry of the Presidency, as well as by way of memoranda submitted by persons residing both inside and outside Guyana. Afterwards, the material evidence would have had to be studied carefully and presumably distilled in order to come up with recommendations.
What would not have made the task of the CoI any easier was the fact that some witnesses appeared unclear as to its particular purpose, so that listening to the submissions of the witnesses one got the impression that some of it did not belong within the ambit of the CoI’s mandate in the first place. Hearing some of the evidence, its relevance or otherwise notwithstanding, was decidedly time-consuming. Truth be told, the CoI itself may have been guilty, but perhaps understandably so, of accommodating witnesses that it might well have done without, though it was clear that once the commission was convened some witnesses, public servants with grievances of one sort or another, took the opportunity to air those at what they perceived to be the proper forum. That meant of course that the commissioners would have further tasked themselves with determining just how to treat with material that might have otherwise been deemed to be of minimal relevance to its particular mission.
Now that the CoI has completed its work the President and the relevant government functionaries will no doubt have to contemplate, deliberate on and pronounce on the recommendations contained therein, a task that will probably not be completed in as short a space of time as may be desirable, bearing in mind that the findings of the CoI are intended to serve, hopefully, as critical building blocks for the renovation of a public service which, in some areas, is broken to the point of near dysfunctionality. The principal weakness of the public service is that it has become shorn of both the political neutrality and the professionalism that might allow it to give effective service to the nation. There is a sense in which some of the institutions comprising the public service that are critical to its effective functioning have become weighed down by political intervention. Nowhere, perhaps – at least according to the evidence tendered to the CoI ‒ was this more evident than at the level of the Public Service Commission, which has become dangerously infected by the plague of political influence.
Some public servants, by virtue of the very circumstances of their respective appointments, had become creatures of the political administration under which they were appointed. The CoI, for example, would have had to spend much time hearing evidence on the controversial issue of contract employment in the public service, a necessary expedient for recruiting specialist skills in some instances, but in others, a dangerous double-edged sword wielded by politicians as a means of riding roughshod over an institution whose task it is to serve the nation rather than the political regime of the day.
How to rationalize the issue of contract appointments to the public service whilst protecting the constitutional bona fides of a reformed Public Service Commission is, hopefully, one of the issues with which the CoI has dealt, since the leverage which the political directorate has long had and still enjoys will have to be addressed if the CoI is to have any real meaning in the first place.
The issue that will unquestionably loom immediately now that the Report of the CoI has been completed and handed in to the President, is the interregnum between the handing in of the report and the commencement of talks between the government and the representatives of public servants on the matter of wage and salary increases and the adjustment of other conditions in the public service. To take the question of wages and salaries, it had seemed, just a matter of a few weeks ago, that there had been a measure of impatience on the part of the Guyana Public Service Union (GPSU) over the delay in engagement with government over wages and salaries. What public servants will now hope, and indeed what is expected of the government, is that the interregnum between the submission of the report of the CoI and the return to negotiations between employer and employee on wages and salaries in the public service will be as brief as possible.
As an aside it has to be said that President Granger’s expressed hoped-for improved efficiency and effectiveness of the public service cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be separated from government’s preparedness to enter into a fairly negotiated arrangement that will allow for wage and salary levels that will suitably incentivize public servants. That may not be all that is needed to refurbish the public service, though it is an axiom which the administration must be prepared to face or else it may as well kiss the very idea of an improved public service goodbye.
On the whole, the importance of the CoI and its report will have to be judged, first, against the backdrop of the extent to which the final submission speaks definitively to the mission or mandate clearly spelt out in its Terms of Reference. The essence of that mission is the restoration of professionalism, integrity and high standards in the public service and properly positioning it to serve the people of Guyana and the cause of the country’s development. In that respect there will be a price to pay in terms of significantly overhauling the public service, imbuing the institution with a heightened measure of competence through training, rewarding public servants in a manner that is commensurate with their respective skills and their contributions, and devising strong measures, preferably constitutional ones, to protect the public service from the dead hand of political sanction that has long hobbled this critical national institution.
