The public sector in Guyana consists of hundreds of different Ministries, Departments, Divisions, Agencies of all sorts and even Corporations. They all have their own objectives, problems, challenges and constraints. They employ scores of thousands of men and women of different ability, background, drive, temperament, motivation and loyalty.

You cannot hope to make an operation of such complexity work properly by issuing centralized guidelines and by imposing across-the-board regulatory norms. In such an attempt the lowest common denominator always prevails and the bad ends up driving out the good.

Take one example - the application of across-the-board norms for

increments of pay. The attempt to equalize rewards, especially in a harsh economic climate, may be laudable. But observe the counter-productive effect in our economy where we can, above all, do without counter-production of any sort. The norm catches in the same net the bad performer and the good, the hard worker and the work-shy, the brilliant creator and the dullard, the innovator and the stick-in-the-mud, even the loyalist and the saboteur - all are caught. The norm makes a mockery of merit and hard work which are indiscriminately lumped together with stupidity and sloth. No surer system to lose the cream and encourage the dregs to come to the top was ever devised by the wit of man. Norms will steadily drive away the best brains, the hardest workers, and the most talented innovators. Increasingly the good men will either opt out or get out.

The dead hand of the bureaucrat is abroad in the land. We must fight it before it takes the nation by the throat and chokes the productive life out of it. Any society tends to invest in itself: a commercial society becomes more commercial, a military society becomes more military, and a bureaucratic society becomes more bureaucratic. Institutions are framed to perpetuate existing methods. The society tends to become even more what it already is. When any such society is hit by a real crisis it is bound to be partly paralysed by the weight of its own investment in itself. It is hard to shift emphasis, change policy, re-think the usual procedures and paper work, re-order priorities, reward outsiders, listen to non-believers.

I fear very much that Guyana is becoming a deeply-rooted bureaucratic society. In such a society all problems are subjected only to bureaucratic solutions. This means that problems become self-perpetuating since the solutions themselves, conceived by bureaucrats, make the problems even worse. It is like the old days, before modern medicine, when the cure for everything was found in letting out a little of the patient's blood. This was the sovereign remedy, taken so far that even pernicious anemia was treated by letting out a cup of blood each day until at last the patient died. Bureaucracy is like that ancient cure. Bureaucratic procedure becomes the universal remedy even for the diseases of bureaucracy itself. Those ancient doctors took a little blood and the patient got a little worse so they then prescribed a few more cups because the remedy was evidently not strong enough to cure. And so the vicious circle spun until the gasping patient died. And now our modern medicine men of how to get things done prescribe a little bureaucracy and, when it makes the patient weaker, prescribe a stronger dose, and stronger yet, re-applying even more of what in fact is killing us.

It is interesting to dissect the bureaucratic process. A regulation is conceived at the center of the administrative web for some no doubt excellent, immediately perceived, purpose. It is broadcast abroad as a general directive. Naturally it will be irrelevant or confusing or contradictory or even positively harmful in a great many of the operations which it impossibly seeks to cramp and confine within its declared intentions. Those subject to such general directives will desperately seek to escape its clutches when the results are perceived to be obviously absurd. They make this attempt because the creative instinct of man is very strong. But the bureaucratic instinct is more than a match for the creative instinct. And the bureaucratic instinct is never, never to give some slack, allow initiative, release the energy of individual men in individual operations - but always, always to tighten up, flatten out, arrange around a norm, suspect initiative and depress individual effort. So the screw is tightened turn after turn, tighter and tighter, until, if we don't watch out, the tap of productive effort will yield not a single drop after a while.

Human nature being what it is, men need to grumble and groan about

those who govern or manage them. Edmund Burke, the great English

Parliamentarian and political philosopher, made that point plainly and well when he wrote the following in his "Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents" two hundred years ago.

To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greater part of mankind.

It is no different now in Guyana than it was in Burke's day in Britain two hundred years ago.

Yet we all know there must be government and that government needs to be firm and decisive and that government even gains strength from a central vision or philosophy informing all its actions. But a central political vision is not to be confused with the bureaucratic urge to centralize all procedures and all programmes. The terrible danger is to confuse strong government with pervasive bureaucracy. The two are not the same. Indeed, bureaucracy made over-mighty is the deadliest enemy of good government.

In the old days when a man died he was wrapped in what was called a winding sheet. Perhaps, for all I know, that still is done. Nations also have their winding sheets, but they are not made of fine, clean linen. The weaving is done from best regulation red tape and the strongest sort of multi-departmental memo and is presided over by bureaucrats who sit behind their administrative looms, humming faster and faster every day and every hour to make the nation's winding sheet.