In ‘Raiding the public purse: pay and patronage’ (SN:27/1/2016), I noted that 250 years ago the framers of the American Constitution, recognising the propensity of human beings to be selfish and greedy, determined that incumbent presidents/governments should not have the authority to increase their own emoluments but may do so for their successors. Thus, the pension of the US president is taxable, tied to that of the salary of the current cabinet secretary. Particularly in an ethnically divided society such as Guyana ,where there are numerous claims and counterclaims of discrimination, such an approach would be far more morally and politically sensible than what is in place today.
In 1992, the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) took office, condemning the perceived ‘super salaries’ they believed existed, and in the early period of its government, Cheddi Jagan attempted to put in place all manner of restrictions, e.g. the highest public service income should not be more than 10 times the minimum wage, but after he died the difference between the two expanded exponentially.
‘The President’s pension and the Prime Minister’s pension shall be seven-eights of the highest annual rate of salary paid to such persons at any time as President or Prime Minister as the case may be or two hundred and four thousand dollars per annum, whichever is the greater:’ (1991 amendment to the Pensions (President, Parliamentary and Special Officials) Act Chapter 27:03).
When the PPP/C came to government the president’s pension was about 6 time the public service monthly minimum wage of approximately $3,200. However, by the time former President Bharratt Jagdeo left office, the pension was over $1,000,000: more than 27 times the then minimum wage of $36,000. Other income relationships had also changed to the advantage of the upper management. For example, in 1991 the salary of a minister averaged about $20,000 which was about 6 times the public service minimum wage, but by 2015 it was more like 14 times’ (SN: 27/1/2016).
During the previous debacle over presidential pensions, the column that had repeatedly called for a reform of how remunerations are set, stated that: ‘While I understand the politics which now demand some reform of former President Jagdeo’s benefits, I believe that what is much more important and will be of lasting benefit, would be a root and branch approach which firstly considers what constitutes fair emoluments in the entire public sector and establish independent periodic income reviews such as the type which exist in other jurisdictions’ (Ibid).
Indeed, in its manifesto for the 2015 elections, APNU+AFC made the commitment to ‘Establish an Independent Constitutional Salaries Review Commission to be responsible for the periodic review of salaries, pensions and other conditions for persons appointed to Constitutional Offices, including the President, Prime Minister, judges, MPs and other special offices.’
In a presentation to the 2015 public service inquiry, I gave an example of the workings of the Trinidad and Tobago Salaries Review Commission, which, for example, considers the remunerations for a similar set of government employees. Its eightieth report claimed to have followed ‘the fundamental principles that guide similar review bodies in other jurisdictions’, the core principles of which are as follows.
(i) establishing remuneration which bears fair comparison with current levels of remuneration paid within the private sector for broadly comparable jobs, considering differences in other conditions of employment; (ii) providing appropriate levels of remuneration to attract, recruit and retain persons of suitable competence, experience, knowledge, skills and personal attributes to fill positions of very high responsibility and trust; (iii) ensuring appropriate differentials in compensation which take into account significant differences in the levels of responsibility between one office and another; (iv) providing the motivational and intrinsic value which compensation packages should carry generally; and (v) providing compensation packages for top political and managerial offices to promote the efficient delivery of public policies and public management solutions.
Incidentally, in the presentation to the COI, I also argued that public service wages should have a performance-related element and I alluded to Cheddi Jagan’s notion that public service wages should be based upon two elements: one to deal with inflation to maintain real value of income and the other based upon economic growth distributed upon some evaluation of individual performance. An initial implementation of this position in about 1994 saw public servants receiving an annual increase of about 17% – much above the rate of inflation.
However, the post-Cheddi Jagan PPP governments, set upon political/ethnic dominance, wanted the administrative space to unilaterally apply across the board end of year awards that hardly cover the rate of inflation. And here we are again, with a similar level of waste of time moralising. GHK Lall wrote, ‘[F]ormer presidents currently receive a monthly pension of $2.2 million each; that’s approx. 22 times the minimum wage of entry level public servants; over 30 times the minimum wage of private sector workers. … The PPP government resists addressing the three-year-old private sector monthly minimum wage of $60,147, but it has the energy to address unlimited benefits for four former presidents’ (KN: 13/6/2026).
We should not forget that the private sector is overwhelmingly owned by supporters of the PPP and that it can pay above the government minimum where, when and to whom it wishes. The income differentials today do not appear much larger that they were a decade ago, which might be because when the Coalition government came to office in 2015, generally, public servants were given more substantial increases.
However, instead of seeking to establish the independent wages commission as promised, it immediately became involved in controversy – even with its own supporters – having to do with a substantial increase in income it gave itself. It also largely ignored collective bargaining, maintained the unilateral across the board payments of the previous regimes and became involved in the recapping of presidential emoluments which, while popular, was in fact just another way of maintaining the morally questionable position of the executive determining its own income!
All this palaver results from the fact that constitutional theory aside, normal democratic practice does not hold in Guyana: governments are not accountable and the PPP knows that as in the past the prevailing public moralising will soon peter out. Democracy is much more than elections and apart from that, in an ethnic autocracy such as Guyana, elections are not sufficient to hold governments accountable. Guyana’s polity cannot muster the political force that peacefully and ultimately holds governments accountable.
For example, the recent ‘No Kings’ protest in the USA brought a multi-ethnic group of about 2.5% of its population – about 9,000.000 people – onto the streets. This would be equivalent to just over 21,000 persons given Guyana’s population of 850,000. Multi-ethnic or not, and I am willing to be proven wrong, but I do not believe that any opposition could bring such numbers onto the streets in contemporary Guyana.
Ethnically divided societies such as Guyana can only be democratically governed by forms of shared governance that range from the liberal use of veto, super majorities, federalism, etc, to the bi-communal/bi-zonal type of arrangement the United Nations has been recommending for implementation in Cyprus since the late 1970s. All these changes require major constitutional reforms and those that were made at the turn of the century came about not because the PPP wanted them or that they were particularly multiethnic but because they were sufficiently consequential.
Put simply, we are in a political quagmire of deception that, among other things, facilitates the continued raiding of the public purse!
