The public service as a victim of politics

Oct 01, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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When you look back at the Jagdeo era, the destruction of this country’s social and moral infrastructure lies on the ground for the nation to see. But it goes back to Cheddi and Janet Jagan. One of the things that the PPP had pent-up emotions about when the PNC was in power was the nature of the public sector in its widest dimensions.
The PPP’s tenacious perceptions were that the public sector in general was supportive of the PNC because it was populated with African-Guyanese.
It may have bordered on naivety to think that public sector employees were politically neutral. In the context of Guyana’s ethnic demography, the PPP could not have won the loyalty of the public sector employees.
That was how Guyana evolved. The identical situation existed in agriculture. When in power, the PNC never succeeded in securing the embrace of rice farmers, small rural peasants and sugar industry personnel, both land workers and factory employees.
In fairness to both Presidents Burnham and Hoyte, there was no structural destruction of agriculture under PNC rule.
The Canje Bridge, MMA scheme and the Demerara Harbour Bridge brought immense benefits to the agricultural sectors. Unfortunately, the four PPP Presidents from 1992 onwards did not take too kindly to a well financed, prosperous public sector.
Henry Jeffrey once wrote that he didn’t think that our politicians deliberately set out to create the backwardness that we have in Guyana. I remember replying to Jeffrey with a pungent disagreement.
I thought that given the pathological animosity of party rivalry and the intensity of ethnic tribalism that characterized Guyana’s polity, it was a foregone conclusion that sectors of life in Guyana would suffer deliberate neglect in the competition for power between the PNC and PPP.
My long years of studying Guyanese politics point to a more vicious vindictiveness on the part of the PPP. While the two PNC Presidents were more tolerant of Indian spheres of income-earning, the PPP from 1992 under Cheddi Jagan onwards was prepared to both weaken and neglect the entirety of the public sector.
In this context, Cheddi Jagan, I think, chose to dissolve whatever greatness people saw in him and was happy to become a politician who played the ethnic game. After 1992, Jagan was not prepared to co-exist with a public sector that his government had to finance. What followed was a complete opposite to what Henry Jeffrey believed.
After 1992 Cheddi Jagan lost his emotional attachment to the University of Guyana. He saw it as an opposition enclave and removed it from his area of concern.
It was under Cheddi Jagan in 1994 that the duty free concessions for lecturers and senior white collar workers were removed
Dr. Henry Jeffrey left UG in 1992 and spent the next nineteen years as a Minister. Had he stayed at UG he would not have published that statement that our politicians never intended the backwardness we now see in Guyana. President Jagdeo and the PPP leadership, particularly Janet Jagan had no intention of funding the University of Guyana.
It didn’t exist for them. I spent 26 years at UG as a staff member and I can say with deep academic seriousness to Dr. Jeffrey that when you examine Mr. Jagdeo’s attitude to UG that backwardness was intended.
So extensive has been the neglect of UG that by the time we reach the next General Election, the APNU-AFC administration would have achieved a plausible record of reconstruction of UG. The money is not and will not be there.
It was no accident that one of the first pronouncements of the APNU-AFC Government was the intention to set up an inquiry into what happened to the public service under the long reign of the PPP. The damage has been immense. The neglect has been horrendous. The politicization has been sickening.
The trade union demobilization has been complete. The introduction of ethnic quotas has been demoralizing. The de-professionalization has been scandalous.
The Jagdeo Government had no use for the Public Service Appellate Tribunal for two obvious reasons. One is that it didn’t want to spend money on a sector of public life that it virtually disliked.
Secondly it didn’t want to retain people who were dismissed therefore if they had no recourse to the Tribunal then they were out. It is expected that the public sector in general will be rehabilitated and it predictable that the PPP will see it as the rehabilitation of a section of Guyana that the Government favours.
This is far from the truth. The public service has been so badly lacerated because of terrible partisan politics the past fifteen years that it truly needs to be rise from the ashes.

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