Latest update May 6th, 2024 12:59 AM
May 22, 2016 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom
The recommendation for the reintroduction of merit increments within the public service may seem like a positive and progressive idea. It is, however, a backward recommendation, because it fails to take account of the changing nature of public services around the world.
Bureaucracies have become too large. They are costing taxpayers too much. They are a drain on national revenues. Value for the services provided is not being obtained.
One analyst showed that recurrent expenditure alone costs the government more than one hundred million dollars per day. It may even be higher. What benefits do taxpayers get for this sort of expenditure and could the same benefits not be provided at a fraction of the cost?
The answer to that was provided not by managerial or administrative efficiency, but by ideology. The rise of liberal governments, beginning in the late 1970s, led to a rolling back of the State.
This revolution is continuing today, because after more than three decades, even non-liberals have come to appreciate the value of the prescriptions for smaller, less intrusive and more efficient government.
Governments are downsizing. Public bureaucracy is becoming smaller. Most of the services offered by governments are being contracted out. Small government is seen as being more efficient. Less government is viewed as being more desirable.
These changes have extended to employment, terms of service and benefits. Contract workers are displacing tenured employment. This is a preference of choice. Professionals want more flexibility and options. Contact employment serves this purpose and unburdens the government of having to pay long term-benefits and pensions
The system of merit increments that is being recommended today is a relic of the past. It is relic that was abused and misused. The public service in Guyana has always been highly politicized. It still is. The new government has dismissed a number of personnel within the public service; they have allowed, also, for the contracts of others to expire without renewal; they have catapulted their own supporters into positions of authority. Instead of less politicization of the public service there is more today than ever before.
A system of merit increments is suited to a so-called neutral public service. A neutral public service is a fiction. It does not exist and has never existed. This realization is what has led many professionals to opt for contract employment.
Merit increments were discarded long before the PPP came into office. The financial problems that the Hoyte administration found itself in led to an abandonment of that system also. It was too cumbersome and tedious for merit increments to be implemented at a time when the public service could not afford to keep abreast with high inflation.
The PPP did not dump merit increments; they inherited a structural adjustment programme that led to wage restraints. A victim of those wage restraints were merit increments. Merit increments and performance-based promotion and salary increases were abandoned long before the PPP came to power, but like the failure of National Service which went into life-support under the PNC, the demise of merit-based benefits are being laid at the feet of the PPP.
The truth of the matter is that political merit is what matters these days in the public service, which has become a trough for political rewards. The public service is populated by political apparatchiks. The new government has not changed that. There has been exchange rather than change.
The PPP did promise, in the National Development Strategy, that there would be a return to return to merit-based performance. In a highly politicized public service, the merit increments would always be affected by political judgment. In a bloated public service, the resources that it would require for performance-based assessment would lead to controversies and delays in paying increases.
The changes to the public service and the contraction of government have all rendered redundant, the system of merit increment. Professionals are not staying long enough to justify the reintroduction of such systems.
Political apparatchiks have become stationary fixtures in the bureaucracy. Persons are being employed beyond the age of retirement. Retirees are being reemployed en masse. As a result, there is limited upward mobility in the system. When last did anyone see a promotion list in the public service? Political appointees are being brought in to fill senior positions. Promotions, these days, involve applying to another department or ministry for a higher-paying job.
What Guyana needs is not a return to old discredited systems. What Guyana needs is less government, smaller government and outsourcing of government services. A leaner public service is the answer to Guyana’s problems.
GRA catch EXXON trying to hunch GUYANA over 11 BUS dollars in one shot!!!!
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