A results driven, customer focused institution recognised for innovative leadership, integrity, and professionalism in promoting socio-economic stability and sustainable development in Guyana is the aim of the public sector reform being undertaken by the government.
As a consequence, Jennifer Webster, Permanent Secretary of the Office of the President who is the point person for the project says that the focus is not on downsizing but on rationalizing the public service. In recent years, though there are a number of vacancies the government has only been filling key and critical posts.
The reform is premised on the public service playing key roles in the government's poverty reduction programme and in facilitating the achievement of the National Deve-lopment Strategy.
The reform plan will be addressing issues of overlapping and duplication with respect to organisational roles and responsibilities and blurred lines of functional authority with a number of agencies that result in inefficient use of human and financial resources and confused lines of accountability.
It will also address the issue of sensible and timely assessments and the organisation of programmes around citizen service and improving accountability and transparency so that the public knows what the government's programmes are achieving and how it is being done.
The Public Service Ministry
Webster explained that to achieve the objective of the planned reform it is necessary to attract and retain highly motivated, qualified personnel in the public service who would partner with stakeholders to provide quality services that exceed the public's expectations in the pursuit of poverty reduction and national development.
The aim she said would be to attract bright young people who would make a career of the public service as well as attract professionals to fill middle management positions. In most ministries the critical gaps are at the middle and upper management levels.
National training plan
Asked about plans for training which would enhance the capacity of the lower level staff, Webster says that a National Training Plan was being drawn up and that the Public Service Ministry is already engaged in training programmes to enable public servants in grades 1-6 to better understand the operations of their individual ministries.
The reform plan provides for the establishment of new human resources management infrastructure. This aspect of the reform plan addresses staffing, classification, human resource planning, performance measurement and training initiatives that are clustered into a three-phase multi-year approach. It concentrates on building capacity while re-establishing transparency and fairness. Successful implementation of this aspect of the reform programme is expected to improve the use of human resources and staff morale and increase the skills of the public sector workers.
Critical to recruiting and maintaining staff is the question of public service pay and Webster says that the Modernisation Board, which is to be put in place to manage the reform, will focus on this issue. "People want to be properly paid."
Retirement age
In line with pay are the pension and retirement benefits and Webster says that this is an issue which she expects to be tackled in the second phase of the modernization programme. In tandem with the pensions issue, Webster says that some consideration is being given to raising the retirement age, which at present is 55, with the option of early retirement at 50 on a reduced pension.
She observes that once in good health a person at 55 still has a lot more to offer. Also she says that the trend in recent times is to move towards later retirement. In New Zealand, she said, the retirement age is between 60-65 years.
Asked about the reaction of the Guyana Public Service Union (GPSU) to the reforms, Webster says that she senses the union's recognition of the need for reform. Also she points out that funds have been provided to enable the union to consult with the membership on the proposed reforms.
The union's response
Current Affairs has not as yet been able to canvass the views of the union but plans to do so as it tracks the implementation of the reforms. The GPSU has expressed dissatisfaction over the years with government's recruitment policy which emphases hiring staff on contract rather than through the Public Service Commission, its decision to stop the check-off system, its less than timely deduction of union dues by those workers who so authorise it and its approach to salary negotiations which it says departs from normal industrialisation practices.
Implementation of the design plan for the modernization submitted since May last year is awaiting the completion of the GPSU's consultations with its membership.
Accounting system modernised
Also being modernised and already in train is the government's accounting system which is completely modernised which Webster says in meant to achieve greater accountability and improvement in the management of the country's financial resources. There have been reports about glitches in the system which resulted in some ministries and departments being paid late.
About the new accounting system being introduced under the Government Economic Management Programme Webster says it will require the ministries to plan more systematically their activities and programmes. The aim of the new arrangement is produce greater accountability.
The design plan was drawn up by the Canadian company, The Governance Network (TGN), and is the result of extensive consultation with government officials, workshops with senior public service officials to shape a vision of what the public service of the future should be as well as capacity building workshops for the local officials who would work along with the TGN consultants.
It plans to put in place a phased approach to building a new performance monitoring and evaluation structure for the public sector that begins with initial and tightly targeted capacity building initiatives, expands to provide hands-on awareness of the challenges and benefits of a comprehensive approach to medium-term monitoring of programme performance and further expands to build a public sector- wide capacity to assess the impact of programming.
It also included horizontal studies of management and government systems across the public sector, surveys of the employees of the various ministries as well as the collection of data on the 22 subject ministries. Crucial activities were the high-level workshops for senior decision makers with a view to moving from visioning to the practical realities of modernization as well as the synthesis of the inputs of the Cabinet and the leading group of public sector officials involved in the exercise and the shaping of the implementation schedules, markers and estimated cost of implementation.
The roles of Permanent Secretaries
Webster commenting on the design plan says that it provides for some immediate steps to be take and these include clarifying the roles and responsibilities of the permanent secretaries which includes the development of job specifications and core competencies for each of them.
Also required is the development of specific accountability accords between the President, his Ministers and each PS that outlines the governance framework, programme and policy expectations, accountability and reporting mechanisms and performance criteria and measures.
Another of these immediate steps according to Webster requires the permanent secretaries to identify three key areas for reorganisation based on the diagnostic reports of their ministries that would improve their efficiency.
Another immediate step is the rationalisation of programme responsibilities of the various ministries so as to address issues such as overlapping and duplication, and possible alternate ways of undertaking the various programmes and laying the foundation for a variety of human resource management initiatives including organisational design and classification of positions among them. Some immediate benefits that would accrue to the country as a result of the latter initiative would include better service to the public, improved ability to target resources to the Poverty Reduction Strategy Programme and the goals of the National Development Strategy.
Accountability
Given the government's reliance on corporatised agencies for service delivery and the extent of unevenness in the governance of these agencies, Webster says that proposals have been made to strengthen accountability by better categorizing them and setting governance standards. These proposals are to be implemented in phases that begin with the building of a complete picture of all the various bodies and then crafting custom built accountability frameworks and providing for the staff of these agencies long-term capacity building in the new skills.
The present reform plan is a variation of the public sector reform programme initiated under the PNC administration funded by the British government. That plan had seen the ministries reduced to 11 and the administration had organisational support for topping up the salaries for posts designated as key and critical. With the change of government the present administration reversed the reduction of the ministries and in 1993 when the funding became available decided that it would be better to spread the funding support for salaries across a wider number of posts than had been envisaged under the previous administration.