Is it that the Gov­ern­ment of the day, as its pre­de­ces­sors, is not able to deal frontal­ly, proac­tive­ly and in a mean­ing­ful man­ner with the hard­core prob­lems of the coun­try?

In­stead of such en­gage­ment, the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) Gov­ern­ment and its part­ners fo­cused last week on the fir­ing of over 300 CEPEP con­trac­tors col­lec­tive­ly re­spon­si­ble for over 10,000 work­ers. It al­so ap­par­ent­ly came like a thief in the night, with none of the con­trac­tors aware of the move un­til they were hand­ed the ter­mi­na­tion let­ters signed by CEO Kei­th Ed­dy.

Those fired are per­sons with few skills, many of whom are un­able to get jobs in the pri­vate sec­tor, a sit­u­a­tion that has been ev­i­dent for this de­mo­graph­ic through­out the his­to­ry of every gov­ern­ment since the 1960s.

And with every gov­ern­ment, the rea­son­ing for the so­cial wel­fare pro­grammes has been the same: the in­di­vid­u­als in­volved have lit­tle train­ing, or even a dis­po­si­tion for work in the pri­vate sec­tor, and there­fore are giv­en the op­por­tu­ni­ty to put bread on the ta­ble for their fam­i­lies and to send their chil­dren to school.

Is there a now con­crete plan to have the fired work­ers se­cure em­ploy­ment and/or to cre­ate jobs for them­selves? How are they to make their way in the econ­o­my and so­ci­ety?

Ten thou­sand work­ers and their three to four de­pen­dents per house­hold are not sim­ply go­ing to dis­ap­pear. Or is this sim­ply an ef­fort to re­place sup­port­ers of the pre­vi­ous gov­ern­ment with those of the in­cum­bent?

Does the Gov­ern­ment have a plan to re­place the so­cial wel­fare pro­grammes ac­cessed by these CEPEP work­ers with more pro­duc­tive ini­tia­tives, in­clud­ing self-gen­er­at­ing em­ploy­ment? If not, so­cial dis­rup­tion will sure­ly be the re­sult.

In an at­tempt to pre­vent the move, how­ev­er, the work­ers se­cure le­gal rep­re­sen­ta­tion, so the pub­lic now waits to see how this will de­vel­op.

But the fir­ings don’t stop there. In yet an­oth­er in­stance, the po­si­tion of the Gov­er­nor of the Cen­tral Bank, a high­ly pro­fes­sion­al and in­cred­i­bly im­por­tant job, has been made sub­ject to the pol­i­tics of an in­cum­bent gov­ern­ment.

Such po­lit­i­cal ma­noeu­vring goes be­yond the well-known in­stance of gov­er­nor Jwala Ram­bar­ran be­ing re­moved from of­fice by the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment gov­ern­ment, to when Dr Eu­ric Bobb was con­struc­tive­ly dis­missed from the po­si­tion of gov­er­nor of the bank by Prime Min­is­ter ANR Robin­son’s gov­ern­ment.

What the fir­ings and re­place­ments do is to send the mes­sage of a po­lit­i­cal­ly par­ti­san Cen­tral Bank gov­er­nor who is in­stalled to do the bid­ding of the gov­ern­ment of the day.

In this case, Dr Alvin Hi­laire was forced in­to con­flict with the Gov­ern­ment when he re­port­ed­ly re­fused to give con­fi­den­tial in­for­ma­tion to the ad­min­is­tra­tion re­gard­ing those who were us­ing high lev­els of for­eign ex­change.

In­ter­est­ing­ly, im­me­di­ate­ly on his ap­point­ment as gov­er­nor, ex­pe­ri­enced com­mer­cial banker and for­mer UNC fi­nance min­is­ter Lar­ry Howai said he would not be breach­ing Cen­tral Bank con­fi­den­tial reg­u­la­tions.

“I will not be giv­ing names to any­one,” Howai told this news­pa­per last week.

Isn’t that the said po­si­tion adopt­ed by for­mer gov­er­nor Hi­laire?

And the re­moval of WASA CEO Kei­th Hal­l­i­day just over six moths in­to his tenure al­so still lingers in the pub­lic’s psy­che.

There must cer­tain­ly be in­sti­tu­tions and pro­fes­sion­al po­si­tions in the gov­ern­men­tal es­tab­lish­ment which should be placed be­yond po­lit­i­cal ma­noeu­vring to serve nar­row in­ter­ests. Need­less to say, cit­i­zens will cer­tain­ly be wait­ing to see whether bet­ter sense pre­vails even­tu­al­ly.