The purge and the plunge
May 23, 2017 , http://www.kaieteurnewsonline....ge-and-the-plunge-2/
Guyana’s public service has long suffered from a lack of skills. There was always a shortage of skills necessary for developing, implementing and monitoring projects of the government.
The shortage was attributed both to the fact that these skills were never nurtured within the public service, as well as because of migration. In British Guiana, the best brains quickly migrated, since there was not much development taking place in the country. The colonial government was not much interested in national development.
Colonialism had conditioned the citizens of the colonies into believing that there was a better world in the metropolis, and therefore those who could, left. That trend has continued. It matters not how improved is the economy of Guyana, there will be a large stream of Guyanese who do not want to live and work in Guyana.
Cooperative socialism scared a lot of Guyanese, and they left in droves. They took with them the skills they had and they took their money. The country became poorer because of that wave of migration.
The brain drain has continued unabated ever since, with more and more Guyanese leaving. One of the areas badly affected by the brain drain has been the public service. But the private sector has also been affected.
Young and old are complaining about not having jobs. But both the private sector and the government are equally complaining about not being able to attract the skills which they need.
The shortage of skills within developing countries has created a large industry of consultants who go around the world selling their skills for a high price. The Government of Guyana has had to source critical skills from this pool. Recently, foreigners were contracted to develop an energy strategy for Guyana. The development of the strategy was outsourced to an international organization who recruited skilled personnel to develop the strategy.
A basic document such as a renewable energy strategy could not have been developed in Guyana, because the country simply does not have the skills to produce such a document.
The government has produced a White Paper for the sugar industry. The Paper has been criticized as being a ‘statement of the problem’. It was not a proper White Paper. It lacked a basis of support for its recommendations. Reading it, one felt that the government had decided on a strategy, and then wrote the paper to fit that strategy. This was not in doubt, because of the shortage of skills needed to develop such a document.
The Caribbean faces similar problems. When the Caribbean was negotiating the Economic Partnership Agreement between the European Union (EU) and the countries which constituted the region which the EU had designed as CARIFORUM, the Caribbean was at a disadvantage in those negotiations because of the superior skills and data sets of the European negotiators.
Guyana is therefore not alone when it comes to the brain drain. Guyana is now facing a crisis in project implementation. The government is worried about the low rate of implementation of the Public Sector Investment Programme.
Unfortunately, the government has to take some blame for this and the other skills shortages which it now faces. The government was hasty when it came into office in replacing persons within the various government departments. It assumed wrongly that the newcomers, many of whom turned out to be retired persons, were all good substitutes for those whom they replaced.
There has been a major change of guard within the public service. The opposition refers to it as a purge. Persons with the knowledge of how things worked and how to get things moving were replaced by newcomers, many of whom simply cannot get things moving. The result has been that there has been a slowdown in public administration. The ‘purge’ has led to a plunge.
The people who got the job done were removed and replaced, in many, not all instances, with persons who are simply unable to get the job done. There is a lot hot air within the government system. There is a lot of movement, but no momentum.
The problem is not just the shortage of skills. The bigger problem is that the limited experience which was available within the system was gotten rid of, and those that have replaced that experience are still learning on the job. In the meantime, projects are stalled and things are taking longer than usual to be completed.
The government will try to employ more persons to solve the problem. But it will fail there again, because numbers cannot compensate for quality.