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Coalition gave political appointees ‘lifetime contracts’- Gail Teixeira
Minister of Parliamentary Affairs and Governance, Gail Teixeira
According to Minister responsible for Parliamentary Affairs and Governance, Gail Teixeira, the former Coalition administration failed to include termination clauses in the contracts of politically appointed government employees.
“What we discovered is that a number of the contracts for these political appointees, for some strange reason, is not like the normal standard contract that is used in the public service as the APNU+AFC deliberately left out the clauses of termination in contracts” the minister told Kaieteur Radio during an interview on Room 592, hosted on Wednesday by Dr. Yog Mahadeo and journalist, Leonard Gildarie.
Minister Teixeira went on to disclose that the contracts of these political appointees, which will now take them into 2022, were renewed as late as July 30 of 2020, three days before the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) had declared Dr. Mohamed Irfaan Ali as President.
“Some contracts” the minister said, “were for persons who were already in the system but were getting extensions, or new contracts with extensions.”
“This is what I am taking about; the level of depravity to do this. One can even call it criminal. There must be something about decency or righteousness. Mr. Granger must have known by April that he had lost the elections, and to go and renew contracts is a level of depravity,” Teixeira highlighted.
While she could not state how many cases the ministry has discovered with the strange contract clauses or how many political appointees they found across the board, the minister did indicate that, “We’re still discovering, so we haven’t had a chance to add it up as yet, but that will be done in the upcoming week. I thought I found all there was to find, but I found more today, which I now have to go and investigate. We discovered that there is another layer of political appointees that we haven’t addressed.”
Teixeira shared that a former minister under the previous PPP government who had recently reassumed office found that 21 of those in her secretariat were political appointees. “That’s just one area of her ministry and that ministry is very big” she said, while adding that, “To see 21 political appointees in one office is absolutely mindboggling, and they were not working for small, basic salaries— quite generous in fact.”
The Governance Minister maintained that she wishes not “to take food out of anybody’s mouth” but noted that one has to bear in mind the extent of political appointees across ministries and the cost it imposes on the national treasury. She indicated that the Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs, Anil Nandlall, has been challenged to investigate the matter.
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