Building State Capacity in the Caribbean – The State of the Civil Service in Guyana

Dec 25, 2020 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,

The captioned document is dated November 2018. It is essentially an ‘assessment of the Human Resources Management functions’ of the administration in operation in 2017. It begins with a review of the organisation structure and the operationalities of the HR function as observed in Guyana’s Public Service in 2017, the major components of which are identified as follows:
 Public Service Commission
Mandated by the Constitution to ‘monitor the management’ of:
• recruitment
• promotion
• discipline

 Department of Public Service
(Formerly the Public Service Ministry)
• Responsible for overseeing the Public Service, albeit from within the Ministry of the Presidency
At this juncture the view needs to be expressed that there obtained a substantive contradiction in terms, whereby the Ministry of the Presidency implicitly reduced its authoritative status of over-viewing and pronouncing on HR issues arising from (comparator) Ministries, by instituting the over-arching decision-maker in the Human Resources Management function as a Department. How then does the ‘Department’ address similar internal issues which arise? Indeed there is on record at least of one critical disciplinary issue having to be outsourced in order to obtain an informed decision that would achieve acceptance as unbiased within its own Department.
Interestingly, the IDB document observes as follows:
“The Department’s duties included:
• providing personnel requisite training
• consulting services’ to other (?) ministries and divisions
• determine number of positions required within ministries
• establish salaries and grade levels.”
Once again, it is clear that the Department operated above the level of ‘servant Ministries’. The following Exhibit seeks to portray the confusion of accountability relationships.
Notes
1) DPS is not a Ministry
2) There are no other official Divisions in the Public Service
Exhibit

Roles of Divisions
Training
• Scholarship Awards
• Plan, develop and implement training programmes
• Prepare entrants to Public Service via the Public Service Staff College
The creation of a ‘Staff College’ totally ignored the fact that there was a long established training facility within the public service that catered for all levels of staff.
To establish a lavish facility merely for inducting aspirants for entry level public service jobs could not possibly add substantive value to the performance of any Ministry, assuming of course there were in fact accommodating vacancies.

Central Personnel
 Monitoring and addressing performance deficits of personnel units in line Ministries
 Reviewing Job Descriptions and related Job Specifications
IT Division
Objective – to raise performance to international standards
The Human Resources Management Function
The captioned document observed, quite correctly, that the ‘legal framework in Guyana remains largely oriented toward personnel administration rather than human resources management? The situation still obtains at this time of writing.
It further observes therefore that ‘strategic human resources management planning is not currently practised in the Guyana Public Service, nor is there any effective supporting Human Resources Information System across ministries’.
Needless to say also, there is no inkling of any Succession Planning, which of course precludes the necessity for any Performance Evaluation programme, since the latter has been replaced by the well-established system of across-the-board annual increases which (consequentially) diminishes any concept of motivation amongst performers (too many of whom are overvalued).
The document goes on to remark on the poverty of collaboration between Ministries, and indeed amongst Permanent Secretaries, albeit in the absence of any relevant formal communication construct.
For example, it reflects on the inconsistency in, if not absence of, job descriptions, too many of which are said to be ‘outdated’. Note the following quote: “According to a sample of Permanent Secretaries, 50-75 percent of workers have job descriptions. However, less than 25 percent of them are valid. The inclusion of performance standards and job-specific competencies is inconsistent”. One is therefore left to wonder to what extent is the existing performance appraisal form utilised.
The review refers to the 14 Grade salary structure which existed since 1992 and the related scales. It refers to the 2016 Commission of Inquiry Report into the Public Service which revealed that:
i) “37 percent of all grades are paid above the maximum”;
ii) “11 percent are paid below the minimum”
The above was hopefully corrected by the debunching exercise that was alleged to have taken place as a result of the COI’s report.
Notwithstanding, the historical concept of earning an ‘increment’ has long been forgotten by the actors, and as unknown to the decision-makers.
All the foregoing indicate that there is no structured path to promotability that is recognisable across public service agencies, even in the face of criteria that in any case are hardly referred to.
The review makes reference to reports of officers acting ‘inordinate periods of time (up to 10 years) without being promoted to the substantive post and without any clear rationale being communicated’.
Most critically, however, the analysis does not delve into the constipated 14 Grade Job Structure. Once again the question must be asked how it is possible to ignore the substantive changes in technologies and related jobs, skills and competencies, and simplistically cramp new jobs into the same dated categorisations evaluated and graded in 1992.
It is indeed a wonder that even the Union(s) involved have overlooked this critical faultline.
In the meantime there is the unregulated disposition to contract employees for new jobs, and reward them impetuously with pay for jobs not objectively evaluated, along with related competencies to cope with the challenges of the transitional strategies which the current administration has undertaken to implement.
It is therefore imperative for the latter to appoint a group or groups of competent professionals (including from the Caricom Region) to undertake the major restructuring that is so urgently needed. Such a comprehensive undertaking would take no less than one year, during which the reconstruction of the Human Resources Management function in the Guyana Public Service must have primary attention.
The above constitutes but a summarised version of the first 13 pages of an analysis of our Public Service that demands the attention of any administration, and certainly the current one, who should not rest their laurels on the mere changing of Permanent Secretaries and Regional Executive Officers.
There needs to be a very proactive focus on developing the management decision-making capacity, the technical capabilities which are required to incentivise highly productive public servants, and human resources management functionaries in particular – so much needed in an increasingly multicultural business environment, and in pandemic times.
The foregoing is but the first instalment extracted from the IDB’s analysis. The next will reveal the actual ratings given to specific activities of the Guyana Public Service based on the IDB’s index.
E. B. John
Human Resources Management
and Development Consultant

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