We are caught in an injudicious system

Dear Editor, Please forgive my repetitiousness, but very recent pronouncements in relation to the governance system in this country once again give pause for anxiety, and indeed alarm.

My repetitiousness starts back with the following commentary by the Commissioners who inquired into the Public Service. However formulated, the quote below represents a profound concern about the long existing dysfunctionality of the Public Service Commission largely engendered by the poor selection of its membership:

Para 80 “... the PSC has ... the power to make appointments to public offices and to remove and to exercise disciplinary control over persons holding or in such offices”.

The Report went on to observe as follows:

“83. At present the PSC has the President of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions (FITUG) as its Chairman. He, as a member of the Commission, was elected to its chairmanship by others of its members. Among the latter are the President of the GPSU which is the certified recognized union representing Public Servants; an Executive member of the GPSU; and three other members.

“84. Queries were raised about the bona fides and tenability of the PSC as constituted. These included whether or not there was the possibility of the Commission being contaminated by bias and conflict of interest”.

“86. Similar questions were put to the President of the GPSU, too, regarding the likelihood of conflict of interest and bias arising from, say, a member of the GPSU appearing before the GPSU with a grievance while he and the Executive member of his union, were members of the PSC. The grievance before the Commission may well have originated from the GPSU where he and the Executive member had previously participated in the preparation of the

case of the aggrieved member”.

While obviously the responses were in strenuous denial, those who know better (including other trade unionists) would not be convinced.

What they may well be convinced of is that the originators of the Commission could not have read the report diligently enough to debate with its authors “the possibility of the Commission (PSC) being contaminated by bias and conflict of interest”.

It is hardly necessary however to have to resort to a charge of oversight when the rarest senses of all, commonsense, pointed to ‘conflict of interest’ being in plain sight of the parties concerned.

But as it turned out, this blindness was more recently compounded by a show of deafness that has left all intellects dumbfounded: the appointment of an acting Chairman of the Public Service Commission as a member of the Judicial Service Commission.

It so happened that this event took place the very week during which there was an irrefutably verifiable report of the incumbent involved campaigning to have a senior staff member of an autonomous government agency (not in the public service) to join the GPSU.

Apart from the crass stupidity of the exercise (by no means singular) this latest appointment constitutes a derogation of the relevant constitutional provision. It not only subverts integrity, but assumes a prior posture over morality; and perhaps, most grievously, assaults the intelligence of the judiciary, amongst those electors who earlier would have been bemused by the notion of accountability.

To use a very bad pun, we are caught in an injudicious system.

Perhaps more alliteratively, a colleague called it ‘a complete circle of comprehensive compromise’.

Yours faithfully, E B John