ANGELA Johnson, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Public Security, has agreed that guidelines should be put in place to establish principles that are desirable for instituting a powerful, professional public service.Johnson, during testimony at the ongoing Public Service Commission of Inquiry (CoI) last Friday, approved a number of suggestions for the improvement of the public sector services. These suggestions were posed by Chairman of the CoI, Professor Harold Lutchman.
The PS agreed that no civil servant ought, as a result of political interference, to be menaced in the security of tenure of his post in the public service.
NEUTRAL BUT NOT NEUTERED
She also posited that the political independence of the public service should be apparent as well as real, and no political or other influence ought to operate in ways that hamper the freedom of judgment and initiative of civil servants.
According to Johnson, public servants should remain loyal to the government as a whole but political interference should not operate, weakening this impartial loyalty. In other words they should be neutral but not neutered.
The PS, who has been employed on contract some years now, said Public Service reforms are the solution to many challenges and deficiencies, and political interference ought not to militate against the exercise of objectivity on the part of the civil servant.
With responsibility for the daily administration and management of financial resources, her performance is evaluated by the minister under whom she is employed and if he at all operates in a way unethical, she has the responsibility of correcting that minister.
As a public servant, she is there to serve the people, and with a change of government, the laws of her office remain unchanged and the new government should follow those very laws.
“We have to follow the rules and the regulations so that whichever government comes we have rules which that government follows,” she said of permanent secretaries.
By Shauna Jemmott