The political parties lack depth in their leadership and talent

Aug 29, 2019 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

The main political parties, the PPPC and the PNCR, have always lacked depth in their leadership. After the demise of their founding leaders, Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham, this came back to haunt them.
They have assumed power at various times and found themselves not equipped to deal with it. The present bunch of Ministers of the APNU+AFC is perhaps the weakest ministerial team ever fielded by the PNCR.
The President does not have a strong supporting cast and this has been responsible for the mediocre performance of his government. His Ministers have let him down badly. Some are out of their depth. Many are more form than substance. Quite a few are past their best. And most simply do not have what it takes to become Ministers.
This lack of talent has been as a result of the division of the spoils of elections. This process results in the sharing out of ministerial and political positions to party activists. But many of these persons have never run anything in their life, have never achieved much in life and therefore cannot be expected to be responsible for large bureaucracies.
Politicians are not always suited to ministerial responsibility. This is a problem not just here in Guyana alone but everywhere in the developing world where the Westminster system is found in developing countries. And this failure on the part of ministers to adapt to public administration has resulted in many of them failing at their jobs.
There are persons who should not be working within the government who are working there and doing so only because of their political connections or relationship to certain politicians. And when one considers that the political parties lack depth in terms of talented people, it shows the dangers of political appointees.
The blame for failed policies and failure to implement polices cannot, however, be always laid at the doorstep of Ministers. One of the chronic problems facing the public administration system in Guyana is the lack of the right skills – not the lack of skills but the lack of the right skills.
The APNU+AFC has found itself in a most embarrassing situation with respect to its Public Sector Investment Programme. In May of this year the Minister of Finance was reported as saying there were challenges in the implementation of the PSIP. This is a problem which has historically faced PNCR governments and it may have something to do with the politicization of technical positions within the government.
Many of the persons who are entrusted with executing government policies have never built even a dog pen. They have little or no hands-on-experience in project management. It’s for this reason that the government should recruit private sector personnel who have the experience to do the job. But given the high levels of cronyism and nepotism within governments, it is hard to expect the government to go searching for the right skills when political lackeys are always knocking at their offices begging for jobs and bad-mouthing incumbents.
The government should not be searching within the political parties for persons to run ministries and departments and agencies. The government needs less partisan appointments and more political appointments.
The next elections therefore have to be about both political parties, the PPPC and the PNCR blooding talent. It has to be about including persons with the aptitude and experience to be able to implement as PSIP which is going to be multiple times larger than the present PSIP.
Those persons cannot be found within the political parties. The political parties do not have the talent. Those who control the two main political parties are however not interested in searching for this talent because this always comes with the risk of leadership challenges. Guyanese will therefore have to settle for the square pegs in the round holes.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper)

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The political parties lack depth in their leadership and talent

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