While the Administration was promoting its Public Sector Modernisation Programme (PSMP) last June, it was also conducting its most far-reaching shuffle of permanent secretaries, the persons needed to implement the very programme.

The one-year programme, jointly funded by the Government of Guyana and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), emphasises improving technology, examining job descriptions and developing new work attitudes among public servants. Strangely, though, the Administration has made no reference to the comprehensive ‘Public Service Review’ conducted with assistance from the United Kingdom’s Overseas Development Administration by KPMG Peat Marwick McLintock for the Government of Guyana in 1990, the recommendations of which were already being implemented in 1992 when the PPPC Administration entered office.

Permanent Secretary of the Public Service Ministry (PSM) Dr. Nanda Gopaul asserted that the Government’s goal was to have the PSMP enable Guyana “to challenge any Public Service in any part of the world.” Exactly how and when that would happen was not clear but it was assumed that the shuffling of seven permanent secretaries during June may have been the start of that thrust.

Every modern state needs an efficient bureaucracy - that elite corps of officials who direct the day-to-day business of the government. The move of former Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Education, Hydar Ally, to occupy the second most powerful position in the bureaucracy as Deputy Head of the Presidential Secretariat, therefore, was most significant. Elected only a year ago to the PPP’s Central Committee, Ally’s transfer may have been aimed more at reinforcing the Party’s control over the State bureaucracy than at improving technology. But, in the wake of Ally’s move, six other permanent secretaries - Ganga Persaud, Mitra Devi Ally, Phulander Khandai, Sonia Roopnauth, Doerga Persaud and Willet Hamilton - were dislodged from positions which they had occupied for relatively short periods of less than four years.

In announcing the reassignments, Head of the Presidential Secretariat Dr. Roger Luncheon was at pains to claim that restructuring at the public service level “made it necessary to respond to new circumstances”. The only new circumstances, however, seemed to be the shaky first half of 2003 when certain ministers were embarrassed by administrative gaffes and others threatened to resign. The shake-up was meant to reassert political control over the bureaucracy and restore confidence in the Cabinet.

Permanent Secretaries are meant to be just what they are called. Professional, career officials who are ‘permanently’ attached to their ministries to enable them to counsel political ministers who come and go. They teach inexperienced subordinates who enter the service, coordinate the work of complex agencies, bureaux and departments, and control expenditure through multi-million-dollar annual budgets while providing a high level of service to the general public. Such performance cannot be achieved by contract workers who feel insecure in their posts and are threatened with transfer to unfamiliar territory every two or three years.

While it is acknowledged that ministers must be confident in the loyalty and efficiency of their permanent secretaries and would ask for a change if the relationship between them became antagonistic, transfers should be the last resort. Most ministers do not possess technical expertise in the portfolios to which they are appointed nor know enough about the governmental and administrative procedures required to run their ministries in accordance with the law.

Permanent Secretaries should. They are the CEOs of the State bureaucracy which runs the country. They are the officers who possess the institutional knowledge and memory to provide the continuity expected by the public as well as foreign states and organisations (CARICOM, IDB, OAS, UN, etc.) with which Guyana maintains vital, continuous relations regardless of the party in office or minister holding the portfolio.

Sudden shocks such as the June transfers tend to disrupt these local and international relations, destabilise administration, generate trembling among nervous subordinates, undermine work attitudes among public servants, and delay improvements anticipated under the PSMP. Rather than become a dynamic corps of officials who could challenge more predictable bureaucracies in other parts of the world, Guyana’s Public Service may remain a docile and indecisive appendage to the executive branch.