Political appointees pretending to be competent managers

Jul 08, 2019 Features / Columnists, Letters, News

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DEAR EDITOR,
Recently I saw a post by Ian Mangal on Facebook in which he states that “None of them (Consultants including those of the World Bank) were prepared to challenge (Guyana Executive) power and (our) Ministers, when it was the Ministers themselves who were the danger to the country” Exactly! Its what I have been saying, these ministers are political appointees not competent managers as they are pretending to be, and as a consequence our institutions are practically nonexistent, with Permanent Secretaries who are selected for their compliance and not competence which is contrary to the concept of the post they occupy. This Government in June 2019 even announced that they will be shuffling the PSs, which is utter stupidity. One former Permanent Secretary, Hydar Ally, actually writes political opinions in the newspapers and he campaigns with the PPP, its an extreme case but it highlights the problem and brings it into focus.
On 2003-09-25 Ally even wrote a viewpoint telling us how wonderfully well the PPP government was doing in the 11 years since coming to power in 1992. The fact is that after coming to power in 1992, the PPP destroyed the advances made by Hugh Desmond Hoyte, and here is the evidence from Wikipedia “Economy of Guyana” “The economy made dramatic progress after President Hoyte’s 1989 economic recovery program (ERP). As a result of the ERP, Guyana’s GDP increased six percent in 1991 following 15 years of decline. Growth was consistently above six percent until 1995, when it dipped to 5.1 percent. The government reported that the economy grew at a rate of 7.9 percent in 1996, 6.2 percent in 1997, and fell 1.3 percent in 1998. The 1999 growth rate was three percent. The unofficial growth rate in 2005 was 0.5 percent. In 2006, it was 3.2%, so most of Ally’s glowing viewpoint were in fact not true, it was Hoyte who turned our economy around not the Jagans they enjoyed the Hoyte momentum for a few years, then they turned it down after 5 or 6 years. Now I have to say that the PPP of today is not the PPP of the Jagans, it is much more kind to its business class which it sees as our engine of growth.
However unbelievably in August 2015, according to the newspapers, “a large crowd gathered at the Public Service Ministry’s Training Division, Vlissengen Road, to show appreciation to former Permanent Secretary of Ministry of the Public Service, Hydar Ally. The event, organized by current Permanent Secretary of the Public Service Ministry, Reginald Brotherson, was also attended by Minister of Citizenship, Winston Felix, and Minister of State Joseph Harmon.” The two Ministers Felix and Harmon attended and praised PS Ally’s performance.
Editor, quite contrary to what is normal practice elsewhere, Ally was on the platform with the PPP during the 2015 election campaign when he was still a Permanent Secretary, which is the last thing we should accept our Permanent Secretaries to be doing, and in 2017 a letter appeared in the newspaper by Ivor Carryl in which he states in the last paragraph of his letter that “People like Mr. Ally remain stubborn in the face of the evidence. Fortunately for Guyana, he and his ‘Marxist-Leninist party’ are now the opposition and hopefully the poor will keep them there until they depart from this failed ideology”. So Apparently Mr. Carryl, like me, views Mr. Hydar Ally, a former permanent secretary, as an open member and activist of the PPP! In 2017 he was even selected to be the secretary for education on the Central Executive committee of the PPP, to prove it.
A situation such as this, where a PS, was openly political, whilst still holding a position as a PS, would never be allowed elsewhere. I would never stand up anywhere and declare that Hydar Ally was an outstanding Permanent secretary, it is my belief that he is the worst type of PS, i.e. a man unapologetically politically aligned to a major political party, and is allowed to operate as a PS in a country where people even at the highest levels don’t understand what he is supposed to do, and not do.
Any Permanent Secretary who is a member and activist of any political party must resign. They can of course vote at elections which is their right as citizens, but they cannot be openly aligned to, or be an activist of, any political party, and the reason is simple because the normal citizen must be assured that which ever side is in Government their Permanent Secretaries, and therefore the entire Public Service of the country, will be focused on serving all the people of Guyana not just one group. A blatantly political PS like Ally could never convince any afro Guyanese in this country that he will deal fairly with them. And again I am saying that this goes for both sides. They are both guilty of politicizing and compromising our Permanent Secretaries, here is an example from Wikipedia of what we should want to see happening here, to rebuild out institutions starting with the Ministries, they are the key to everything Editor, since if the Ministry of Education [no reflection on anyone there, just an example] is run by competent people, the standard of education will improve. “In the 1960s the permanent secretary to Tony Benn when he was Secretary of State for Industry [Great Britain] was Peter Carey. After Benn spent government money on worker cooperatives, notably a motorbike company (Meriden Motorcycle Co-operative), Carey went before the Public Accounts Committee and expressed the opinion that his minister’s expenditure had been ultra vires. Benn [the minister] was soon moved to the Department of Energy, while Carey (the PS) received a knighthood in the following honors list.
And the fact that we don’t have proper institutions even the Judiciary is contained in a 2016 USAID report on Guyana entitled “DEMOCRACY, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND GOVERNANCE ASSESSMENT OF GUYANA” in its final report in March 2016. This is what is written in its executive summary, “The coalition government faces deep-seated legacies of single party domination; politically driven ethnic divisions; and a centralized patron-clientelist system with weak, unaccountable, and unresponsive government institutions. Changing this system will not be easy”.
So Editor since 2016 did this government do anything to strengthen our institutions? Let the public decide, but on the face of it, until we have judges who are not prepared to compromise themselves by declaring in 2019 that 34 and not 33 is the majority of our 65 seat parliament, for a government which since 2015 was using its 33 seat majority to run this country, select the executive, make laws and pass budgets but embarrassed us all by ruling that 34 is the majority of 65 required to remove them from Government is unacceptable! I went to Trinidad recently and as a Guyanese who had written on the ridiculous nature of the 34 seat majority matter in the newspapers here, before the CCJ decision, I had to leave one gathering because of the abuse by my “friends” in Trinidad, who since my college days in Trinidad used to call all Guyanese mudheads. They now have just reason to do so. Because all Guyanese are now seen as making that ridiculous ruling!

Tony Vieira

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