PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley has sug­gest­ed that pri­vate sec­tor ex­perts should be con­sid­ered for Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary posts as he ex­pressed his con­cerns that the best peo­ple are not al­ways the ones ap­point­ed to the po­si­tion.

Dr Row­ley made this sug­ges­tion at the open­ing of Nu­trim­ix’s Next Gen­er­a­tion Hatch­ery in Cou­va yes­ter­day, while lament­ing the ar­cha­ic sys­tem of the Pub­lic Ser­vice.

“There’s a huge suite of de­ci­sion-mak­ing in this coun­try that needs to be mod­ernised, start­ing with how does one be­come a per­ma­nent sec­re­tary,” he said, not­ing that dur­ing his many tenures in gov­ern­ment, the poor de­ci­sion-mak­ing at the top of min­istries lead sev­er­al projects to be­come stag­nant or dis­card­ed.

He point­ed to his pre­vi­ous tenure as Min­is­ter of Hous­ing as he de­tailed de­lays that could start from pick­ing land to build­ing a house all the way to the han­dover of keys to the home­own­er.

“I can tell you, get­ting hous­es built from the idea of where you gonna build it to hand­ing some­one a key, you have no idea the amount of slow walk­ing that could take place and the mo­lasses rate that can ap­ply to the de­ci­sion-mak­ing that’s tak­ing place. And that usu­al­ly comes from a lack of vi­sion in the Pub­lic Ser­vice be­cause many of the de­ci­sion-mak­ers do not as­so­ciate them­selves with the out­come of their day’s work. The things are dis­con­nect­ed,” said the Prime Min­is­ter.

He said this lack of aware­ness stemmed from the fact that the vast ma­jor­i­ty of per­ma­nent sec­re­taries were not ex­perts in their min­istries, but sim­ply those who as­cend­ed based on their se­nior­i­ty.

Prime Minister Dr. Keith Rowley delivers the feature address during the official opening of Nutrimix Next Generation Hatchery facility, in Couva, yesterday.

RISHI RAGOONATH

“Many of them are not man­agers and do not as­sume man­age­r­i­al re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the de­part­ments that they head that im­pact so im­por­tant­ly, on the day-to-day lives of per­sons whether you are an in­vestor or con­sumer. And we re­quire some sig­nif­i­cant changes in the pub­lic ser­vice of the 21st Cen­tu­ry,” he said, ac­knowl­edg­ing that there would be some who would chas­tise his po­si­tion based on the con­sti­tu­tion.

The Prime Min­is­ter said, “The con­sti­tu­tion that was writ­ten for us in 1962 in many ar­eas is whol­ly in­ap­pro­pri­ate for a Trinidad and To­ba­go in the 21st Cen­tu­ry—2022. If I tell you now that it is my view that per­ma­nent sec­re­taries should not on­ly come from those who come up and float up to the top in the Pub­lic Ser­vice but should al­so come from man­agers in the pri­vate sec­tor who are hired in­to the pub­lic ser­vice to bring man­age­ment skills to the Pub­lic Ser­vice,” he said.

“If I tell you that is my view, wait and hear what I’m be­ing ac­cused of,” he con­tin­ued.

He added that while the Nu­trim­ix fa­cil­i­ty was a great step to­wards re­duc­ing the num­ber of im­port­ed chick­ens need­ed in Trinidad and To­ba­go, he said there was al­so the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the fa­cil­i­ty could be used to ex­port chick­ens to our CARI­COM neigh­bours.

How­ev­er, he be­lieved there was so much bu­reau­cra­cy in the pub­lic ser­vice cur­rent­ly, that op­por­tu­ni­ty could be lost.

“How does this in­vest­ment sat­is­fy Trinidad and To­ba­go and not be avail­able to sup­ply Grena­da, St Vin­cent, Do­mini­ca, Bar­ba­dos and oth­er peo­ple who are in a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion with­in CARI­COM, where we fight for the sin­gle mar­ket and econ­o­my. Is it that this in­vest­ment is on­ly for Trinidad and To­ba­go?” he said.

“Then you find out that if you try not to ex­port any of this to the neigh­bour­ing is­lands, you come up against an­ti­quat­ed laws and a Pub­lic Ser­vice that is not pre­pared to be the can-do ex­po­nents to get us to ex­port some of this to our neigh­bours.”

The Prime Min­is­ter said, how­ev­er, he had set about get­ting an ad­vi­sor for the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture in a bid to max­imise projects such as the hatch­ery.