Shut it down!

Feb 09, 2021 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – Very little has been heard, publicly, from the Public Service Minister. The few times in which she has been in the public limelight has been to highlight the scholarships, which her Ministry has been granting.
Training is no doubt a priority of her Ministry. But there are far more important issues to be addressed in terms of the public service than scholarships and other forms of training.
The public service has become extremely bloated. Under the APNU+AFC it has become so enlarged that it was a drag on the public purse. It is costing taxpayers G$500M per day to run this public service. The government is not obtaining value for money in the public service.
Her most recent announcement was to indicate that the Bertram Collins College is going to be restructured. This follows reports of a number of the College’s employees being terminated recently.
There is absolutely no need for the Public Service Ministry to restructure the College. It should be closed, not restructured. It is a waste of resources.
The APNU+AFC loved to create bureaucracy. It created a number of unnecessary agencies including the Department of the Environment, the Guyana Youth Corps and the Bertram Collins College.
The latter was widely believed to have been done to allow for the APNU+AFC to control who is employed in the public service. Instead of persons competing for entry-level employment, the college was created to take its cadets who would then go through a period of training and then were sent out to the various Ministries.
The PPP/C when it was in power in the past had attempted a similar system. But it did not have a need to build any college. The trainees as they were known were rotated throughout the public service and received on the job training.
When the Bertram Collins College was created, it generated immediate concerns about the selection criteria for the cadets and the staff. In 2017, this newspaper quoted a senior official of the College as admitting that the institution had a diversity problem.
But by far the greatest concern should have been whether such a college was necessary. This column had argued against the establishment of the college pointing out it was a bad idea.
The Bertram Collins College appeared to be patterned after a military academy. The modern public service however is not the military, which usually requires training colleges. Modern public services perform mainly regulatory functions and provide services to the public. Most of these functions require technical skills at the senior level and only basic skills at the junior level.
Persons leaving school are expected to have the basic skills to function at the entry-level in the public service. If they cannot, it means our school-leaving qualifications are worthless.
Those wishing to enter the public service are looking for employment. They do not wish to have to leave school and then to again enter a classroom to prepare them to do a clerk-level job.
The cadets who are fortunate to be selected for entry into the public service have to be fed, given uniforms, paid a stipend and taken on tours to various parts of the country, and all at taxpayers’ expense. The College also took the form of massive campus, taking over the old GuySuCo headquarters at Ogle.
There was no need for such a facility. Previously public servants were adequately trained either in-house or at the Public Service Ministry’s Training Centre in Vlissingen Road. It was even reported that some of the personnel of the College were enjoying million dollars plus monthly remuneration, and all to train a few school leavers and run some other courses for middle-level management within the public service.
Taxpayers should not be burdened with that monstrosity for a college. It should be closed and the Department of Energy should be moved to that location since a great deal more resources need to be ploughed into the oil and gas sector. That location is near where the Exxon headquarters will be located. This makes its suited for a Department of Energy.
Or, alternatively, the large buildings at the College should be turned into a dialysis hospital or a maternity hospital.
The College, even if restructured, will not improve the quality of the public service. The public service, as was noted years ago, does not have a problem with training. It has a problem with efficiency. Its problems cannot be resolved through training but through downsizing. The public service is overstaffed and there are thousands of pen pushers in the service who are not needed.
The Minster should shut down that college and free herself of an administrative behemoth, which is a burden on the backs of taxpayers.

(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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