Dear Editor, The increase in Ministers’ salaries could have been placed in the public domain with different support for such actions, to include undisputable parameters associated with increased workload. The fundamental rudiments associated with the diverse workloads could have been presented for each Ministry for public debate if needed as well for public consumption.

Even without the increased workload public presentation, this new Government of Guyana (GoG) is faced with a humungous task to correct the multiplicity of existing man-made designed anomalies, of which many may be irreparable, and simultaneously create sustained developmental strategies that would facilitate in time, increased participation in the decision-making process that would affect the livelihood of all citizens of Guyana in an improved manner. The 50 per cent increase in salaries for each Minister of the GoG is not catastrophic, and very reasonable, as direct function of their respective work-loads.

Ministers of the current GoG, work at a minimum 16 hours each day for seven days a week, on call each day, and it does not stop there; the nature of their responsibilities are extreme and cognitively dense. These heavily weighted responsibilities are attached to the general management of individual sectors of the service and productive sectors of the COUNTRY. Such undertakings should not be taken lightly, but very careful analysis of these responsibilities, of which each has a core basis, relative to the design and analysis of public domain policies, must receive prior and meticulous interrogation.

The analysis of the Ministers’ salaries must capture the internal what, why and how mechanisms or machinery within administrative law upon which NATIONAL DECISIONS are made, and such an evaluation requires in-depth understanding of the design and analysis of public domain policies of which labour is an intrinsic component.

The multiplicity of sometimes immeasurable performance oriented stresses sustained in the ministerial portfolio, to provide visionary, applicable, unique and easy-to-understand policy structures, considering  multilevel factorial with several tiers of sub-structures considerations and possible interactions associated with main inputs such as technical, globalised, managerial, specification based, legal, availability, conformance, economic,  crossed by myriads of block variable features for utility by the end-user (citizen) to facilitate measurable outcomes, must be primary considerations.

These abovementioned comprehensive quality policy considerations provide for the legitimate, diverse, bottom-up, moral with built-in flexibilities, to generate multiplicities of alternative, definitive cost-effective solutions to whatever policy-oriented mechanism under consideration. These are the meticulous deliberations that must be laid out for operationalisation with quantitative measurements in order to improve the standard of living of all Guyanese, and, therefore, may be considered each Minister’s primary core responsibility.

This approach to analyse existing public domain policies as well as the formulation of new policies is no easy cut-and-dried task, since it requires considerable multi-depth deliberations within open as well as closed doors. These abovementioned considerations form the envelope which encloses the what, why and how Ministers generate public domain policies to affect the citizens’ well-being, and especially those areas that facilitate improvement of the standard of living of all Guyanese.

We need to have a clear understanding associated with the complexity of the nature of, and the tremendous effort that is required to create those logical frameworks with robust carrying capacities for sustainability, from which the citizens’ standard of living could be improved, within the Ideology of INCLUSIONARY DEMOCRACY (ID), as required by the preamble and Article 13 of the Constitution of Guyana.  Recall it is the first time in the Guyana Space (GS) any political culture adapted ID for unity among Guyanese and that is very commendable, but this new ID approach to foster sustained unity among Guyanese hopefully is envisaged as what Ministers are currently addressing.

Many mistakes will be made to create the appropriate policies that may be able to transverse along this obstacle-laden journey for unity among all races in the GS, utilizing ID, but the said mistakes can surely be minimised in magnitude and frequency of their occurrence. The task before us is not an easy one to implement the principles and practices of ID, which have previously been articulated on 30 separate television programmes and a single workshop in each of Regions Two and Three combined; Four; Five and Six combined and 10 during early 2015.

Further, this tumultuous task of operationalisation of ID, and especially in those areas that are intimately attached to the industrialisation of the mind-boggling multiplicity of marketable natural resources of Guyana, would require not only visionary, quality, conscious leadership and an ignition with tremendous sacrifice, but, also a demonstration of a new brand of leadership with a keen eye at all times to balance risk against objectives, within a schedule of quality operations.

The leadership productive quality attributes the Ministers must possess to execute the new requirements associated with ID are competence, imagination, character, courage, honesty, integrity, resilience, energy and the ability to communicate any applicable cost/benefit analysis associated with the matter at hand.

The period for the Ministers to bring to the citizens of Guyana master-plans for each service or productivity sector within the five-year tenure, would have its challenges associated with the eradication of seemingly a cultural impediment in the scale of corruption, as well as the confidence in the implementation strategies that would require unique innovative manoeuvrability, given the limitations of non-natural resources.

It must be pointed out it is the sustained and derived streams of revenues from these multiple business ventures of different operational configurations, to include public/private hybrid relationships, which will provide those necessary financial resources to capitalise proposed unique and indigenous programmes geared towards the improvement of the downstream standard of living (livelihood) of the current population of Guyana, as well as for our future generations.

In other words, I submit that the planners (Ministers) have to develop realistic and flexible policy-oriented strategies within ID to secure the necessary and almost reliable streams of revenues to finance the diversity of programmes across economic development which is responsible for debt, growth, income, job creation and spending; environment; industrialisation; foreign affairs; institutional development; integration; and physical infrastructure.

Other areas that will place competitive demands of same revenues are security; social services to include culture, education, health services, housing, labour and social welfare services; legislature; commissions and the judiciary, in an effort to satisfy the outlined requirements for the desired improvements.

Charles L Griffith, BS (Ag Eng) MS (Ag Proc Eng) PE