Last week, in a somewhat thespian sort of manner, Minister Kwame McCoy summoned members of staff of the Office of the President to a ‘sit down’ meeting to declare that the President’s staff would be leading the way in the reopening of the Public Service to full time work, departing from the rotation arrangement that had been in place in recent months as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
What he had to say had come, reportedly, on the back of an ‘as you were’ missive from government, directing a general return to work by Public Servants on a full-time basis.
Mr. McCoy’s announcement, whilst coming against the backdrop of the predictable political ‘fluff’ about this being a precursor to the gradual reopening of the country and about the need for state agencies to respond to people’s demand for services, appeared, mind-bogglingly, not to bat an eyelid over the fact that the timing of the out-of-the-blue ‘reopening’ of the Public Service appeared altogether detached from the fact that Public Servants are being asked to respond to what the Minister appears to see as a current public ‘clamour’ for services even as we continue to endure our most lethal period yet for COVID-19.
Mind you, as far anyone can tell, Minister McCoy did not trouble himself to afford us even the slightest details of this frenetic public demand for services that has prompted the back to work call and perhaps more curiously why it is that the Office of the President, which, frankly, is minimally involved in having throngs of service-seekers pouring through its gates, is being required to lead the change here.
And shouldn’t such an important pronouncement, coming as it does at such a difficult time have been attended by certain caveats and cautions that have to do with just where we are as far as the pandemic itself is concerned and what new, stricter protocols might be put in place to protect public servants who are being asked to return to work. Certainly, the manner in which the whole back-to-work ‘proclamation’ has come – that is to say, with no corresponding additional protective procedures and protocols, gives it the appearance of a sort of wing-and-a–prayer edict which, one hopes, is not what is intended.
As things stand, there is abundant reason for disquiet here and if we are going to want to exercise the liberty of declaring, intermittently, just how democratic a country we are, we must, in instances like this, be able to articulate that prerogative. The reality is that there are gaping and unacceptable holes in Minister McCoy’s quizzical declaration and those must be probed and corrected clarified or corrected.
Followers of the global behaviour of the COVID-19 pandemic may well have learnt of last week’s sharp response by South Africa’s Public Service Association (PSA) to the country’s President Cyril Ramaphosa’s announcement of the country’s COVID-19 restrictions and the consequential preparations by the country’s public servants to return to work. In short order, the union made it clear to the government that to recall Public Servants back to work at this stage could result in a renewed flare up of COVID-19 cases. South Africa, for the records, had (up to a week ago) lost 15,992 of its citizens to COVID-19 and its 661,936 victims (again up to last week) makes it the ninth highest casualty country in the world. That is something that our own Guyana Public Service Union (GPSU) may wish to take particular note of.
Somewhere in one of his exchanges with the media Minister McCoy is quoted as saying as follows: “They [Guyanese] have gone through a long and tedious period coming from elections to where we are today and they are anxious to get out of the situation where we can get back gradually to normalcy.”
Whatever may have gone before (elections and the like) what exactly is the Minister saying here? Does this shrill and, frankly, seemingly contrived clarion call about the people demanding services mean that we are now ‘duty bound’ to throw the whole COVID-19 circumstance over our shoulders? Some of us think not, Mr. Minister.
