Contract employees – How will the President act?

Dear Editor,

As the National Assembly sits to consider the Estimates of the Public Sector for the year 2016, the number of contract employees and costs associated therewith will no doubt receive much attention.

In Ram & McRae’s Focus on Guyana’s National Budget 2016, we expressed our disappointment on increases in both the number and cost of contract employees, stating that this was “not healthy for our democracy and places a strain on Article 38 G of the Constitution which requires the public service to be free from political influence.” By way of example, we noted that the Ministry of the Presidency reflects an increase in the number of contract employees from 298 to 505.

The media, conflating our example with other information, highlighted the statement by Ram & McRae drawing responses from Government Ministers.

Minister of State, Joseph Harmon, sought to attribute the increase in the Ministry of the Presidency to organisational changes and posited that the Office of the President cannot be compared to the Ministry of State, which now includes the Ministry of Social Cohesion, Ministry of Citizenship, and the Public Service Department.

In fact, Ram & McRae was not comparing the Ministry of the Presidency with the Office of the President but comparing the two yearend numbers (2015 and Budget 2016) in the same Ministry.

It appears that Minister of Natural Resources, Raphael Trotman, may have been under the same impression and called such an increase virtually impossible, adding that the Ministry of Natural Resources, which was recently designated a separate Ministry, was also included within the Ministry of the Presidency until January 2016.

For clarification, here is what is disclosed on page 44 of the 2016 Estimates for Agency 05 Ministry of the Presidency:

To aid our analysis, Ram & McRae had prepared a detailed table on the number of Contract Employees in the various agencies, with such aggregation and disaggregation that was possible given the limited information in the Estimates.

In reviewing the Ministry of the Presidency, information was taken from Agency 01: Office of the President, Agency 05: Ministry of the Presidency, Agency 14: Public Service Ministry, Agency 24: Ministry of Natural Resources and The Environment, Agency 26: Ministry of Natural Resources and Agency 51: Ministry of Home Affairs.

Comparative information, taking the organisational changes into account, is as follows:

Overall, the 2016 Estimates show that at the end of 2015, the total number of contract employees, inclusive of the Regions, was 5423, of which 545 were with the Parliament Office, Public Service Commission, Teaching Service Commission, Guyana Elections Commission, Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation, Public Prosecutions and Office of the Ombudsman. Those entities are now included among the Constitutional Agencies and Statutory Bodies and their projected number of contract employees in 2016 was not disclosed.

The remaining number of contract employees in the Ministries and Regions would therefore be 4878. The Estimates show the projected number of contract employees in 2016 as 5878 and is therefore an increase of 1000 persons, or 20.5 per cent and an increase of 18.2 per cent in budgeted cost.

We repeat that this is not a problem peculiar to the present Administration. It was under the Jagdeo Presidency that the numbers and cost skyrocketed and continued under the Ramotar Administration.

Between 2010 and 2014, the expenditure on contract employees rose from Gy$4.7 billion to Gy$9.4 billion, an increase of 100 per cent.

We welcome Minister Harmon’s assurance that “there has been a clear direction by the President that it is our intention to return the Public Service to a professional one and so contract hires will be reduced to a minimum”. Indeed this is consistent with the sentiment of Focus that “We sincerely believe that President Granger has the authority to end this abuse. We look to him to act on the matter.”

Sincerely,

Ram & McRae