Dealing with political appointees is not witch-hunting

Dear Editor:

The duplicitous nature of former President David Granger and members of his Party continue, even as they are now in opposition.

I listened with disbelief as he criticised and warned the current PPP/C administration against dismissing individuals who were political appointees under his administration. This disbelief stemmed from the fact that it was his Party that, in 2015 upon entering office, dismissed scores of workers from the Public Sector who were not even political appointees. Persons who were deemed to be supporters of the PPP/C were summarily dismissed without even the benefit of a hearing.

It makes common sense that any new administration would wish to appoint persons who can promote and further their agenda. Therefore, it is normal that whenever the administration changes, those persons make way for persons from the new administration – it would be the decent thing to do and it is common place all over the world. It is not witch hunting.

Persons who are political appointees know very well that they are appointed to serve at the behest of the President and his administration and once government changes, they too must leave. To try to remain on is just an act of bad taste. The fact is that you cannot be critical and be sabotaging the efforts of the current administration and still want to remain in employ of that administration.

One should recall that is was in June 2019 that David Hinds, a member of the David Granger’s APNU+AFC Coalition, who advocated for the “flushing out of PPP moles from the Public Service”. He was advocating that anyone who they deemed sympathetic to the PPP should be immediately dismissed. Where was the criticism then?

What the PPP/C is doing is addressing the issue of political appointees and it is obvious that those individuals have to go. Further, it is also generally accepted that once your administration demits office, those who occupy residences owned or rented by the state, must vacate those residences. In fact they should have vacated five months ago, as they knew since then that they had lost. I believe the new administration was very generous in giving members of the former government three days to vacate and in other cases given some APNU+AFC Coalition ministers one month to get their affairs in order.  In 2015 no PPP/C official had to be asked to vacate the residences they occupied; they left voluntary once they knew the Coalition had won those elections. The duplicitous behaviour on show now, therefore, is an indictment against those former government officials; it is an indictment on them that they now must be asked to do the right and decent thing.

The new opposition has a right to be critical of the PPP/C administration; that is their right. However that does not mean that they can spout wild and dishonest assertions.

Finally and most importantly the current government has a right to appoint individuals they deem competent to carry out the government’s agenda and to rescue Guyana from the predicament the Coalition left it in.

Yours truly
Sherwyn Greaves