Dear Editor,
The recently published pronouncement that the Report of the CoI into the Public Service will be ready by February 29, 2016, offers no reason for applause. Those who monitor see such a deadline as unrealistic at least. The evidence for controverting the optimism of the protagonists can readily be found in the current National Estimates, which in its construct, is a remarkable plagiaristic document, given the fidelity with which it has copied the misrepresentations of the last two decades.
A most simple example, particularly after the careful rearrangement of the governance structure in 2015, there is still a Budget Agency described as the Public Service Ministry.
Immediately related, if not in fact contagious, remains the conjoining of ‘Public and Police Service Commission’ – in clear sight of all the legal luminaries who have been informed by the constitution that they are distinctly separate constitutional entities. The same constitution would also have identified that not only all the commissions, including Gecom, Teaching Service, all the Human Rights Commissions and several more, as constitutional entities so emphatically, that it behoves the said luminaries to explain the methodology involved in transitioning them, along with the Audit Office of Guyana, and the Office of the Director Public Prosecutions, for example, into Budget Agencies.
A most remarkable execution of smoke and mirrors is the embedment of the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (by a former Minister of the previous administration) into the ‘Public Service’. Interestingly, none of the avid commentators or administrators has ever questioned the legality or otherwise of an institution registered under the Public Corporations Act, like GuySuCo, as being a Budget Agency, ie, part of the public service. This travesty accounts for conspicuous groups of medical specialists – critical to the health of the nation – being reduced to the same values as groups of upper-graded ‘clericals’ and ‘administrators’ whose long service alone in bureaucratic non-analytical systems has been the basis for their pay. One does not need to dilate on the inequitabilities of the comparisons, to come to the conclusion how and why the medical sector is under-compensated, demotivated and, too often, under-productive. So that resort had to be taken to placing a disproportionate majority of GPHC staff on contract (not nearly like the numbers in the Ministry of the Presidency).
But review of the National Estimates would easily reflect the ongoing contagion of the employment of ‘contracted employees’ over the past years. Space does not allow a detailed tabular distribution of this category of employee by Budget Agency. Suffice it to say, however, that between 2010 to 2016 the total has grown from 2543 to 4471; with the numbers of the ten Regional Administrations increasing from 851 to 1585 over the period 2012-2016.
It is within the context of the foregoing confused structures one must ask the opinion of the luminaries as to their understanding of what constitutes the ‘Public Service’. The apparent misapprehension is compounded by the beguiled expectations of so many who optimistically confuse public service with public sector. So when there is the frequent glib reference to negotiations with unions (not only GPSU) much excitement is aroused in too many groups of ineligible workers. One area that the GPSU is bound to mine for all the gold it can extract is the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission, a semi-autonomous agency with its own Act, and not a Budget Agency.
So far as the thousands of employees contracted to specific agencies in unspecified jobs are concerned, rates of pay unrelated to the public service 14 grade scales, it takes a lot of imagination, if not recklessness, to define the criteria to which the expected negotiations could apply. How are these disparate pay values going to be rationalised? Would they be transitioned back into normal pensionable status and on what terms? Would the unions be involved in such an exercise?
In the meantime there are the thousands of frustrated traditional public servants whose salaries have been bunched at the same level of entry, consequent on the demeaning across-the-board increases imposed over the past decade at least, and crying out for urgent redress. If and when the de-bunching takes place, as it must, what then will be the compensation numbers to be negotiated?
But all this assumes that the traditional 14 grade scales are at all valid in a century that has seen the growth of new and improved technologies and specialisations, making the most explicit case for the most comprehensive job evaluation exercise ever to be conducted in this country.
What a challenge for all the stakeholders, governors, governed and advisors, who however must first agree on a definition of public service.
Yours faithfully,
E B John
