A staff memo sent out by Reg­is­trar Gen­er­al Karen Bridge­wa­ter-Tay­lor points to the in­sub­or­di­na­tion of a staff mem­ber as the cause of the weeks-long im­passe that caused so much in­con­ve­nience and frus­tra­tion for To­bag­o­ni­ans try­ing to ac­cess the ser­vices of the Reg­is­trar Gen­er­al De­part­ment.

That a sin­gle work­er’s re­fusal to fol­low an in­struc­tion could cause so much chaos shows up a se­ri­ous flaw that may not be lim­it­ed to that pub­lic sec­tor agency.

While Ms Bridge­wa­ter-Tay­lor in­sists that the sit­u­a­tion did not lead to the clo­sure of the To­ba­go of­fice, the fact that it got the at­ten­tion of the Prime Min­is­ter, At­tor­ney Gen­er­al and the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly Chief Sec­re­tary in­di­cates the mag­ni­tude of the prob­lem. It was al­so sig­nif­i­cant that in the ef­forts to re­solve the mat­ter, le­gal ad­vice was sought from se­nior coun­sel.

And all this con­fu­sion erupt­ed be­cause a pub­lic ser­vant re­fused to com­ply with a di­rect in­struc­tion and went so far as to dis­pute the chain of com­mand, in­sist­ing that such an in­struc­tion could not be giv­en by the Reg­is­trar Gen­er­al.

On the face of it, the in­struc­tion giv­en to the work­er did not ap­pear to be un­rea­son­able—de­ploy­ment for a month to Trinidad to learn and train on the Prop­er­ty Busi­ness Reg­is­tra­tion and the Com­pa­nies Reg­istry On­line Sys­tems.

In the nor­mal course of things, such a re­quest would be seen as an op­por­tu­ni­ty to up­grade, ac­quire new skills, and de­vel­op pro­fi­cien­cy in ar­eas of op­er­a­tion that could ben­e­fit the em­ploy­ee in the long run.

Not in this case, how­ev­er.

To fur­ther com­pound the sit­u­a­tion, a se­nior of­fi­cer sent from Trinidad to help out was locked out of the To­ba­go of­fice, re­port­ed­ly on the in­struc­tion of a se­nior of­fi­cial based there.

Al­though the of­fice is now back to op­er­at­ing at its nor­mal lev­els, this mat­ter is far from re­solved. The Reg­is­trar Gen­er­al is now await­ing in­struc­tions from the AG on the next step in deal­ing with this is­sue.

This un­for­tu­nate chain of events not on­ly re­in­forces neg­a­tive pub­lic per­cep­tions about T&T’s pub­lic ser­vice, but shows the lack of mean­ing­ful re­form in that sec­tor.

For all the promis­es from suc­ces­sive ad­min­is­tra­tions to set in mo­tion leg­isla­tive and op­er­a­tional changes to bring about a mod­ern, ef­fi­cient pub­lic ser­vice, there has nev­er been enough po­lit­i­cal will to dri­ve that trans­for­ma­tion.

And so it is that more than two decades in­to the 21st cen­tu­ry, in the face of tech­no­log­i­cal ad­vance­ments and with many so­cial and en­vi­ron­men­tal is­sues to be ad­dressed, this coun­try is still sad­dled with a pub­lic sec­tor that has not evolved suf­fi­cient­ly to ef­fec­tive­ly deal with mod­ern-day re­al­i­ties.

T&T’s pub­lic ser­vice is still gov­erned by leg­is­la­tion that dates back to the 1960s, so it is no won­der it is still so de­fi­cient in the de­liv­ery of ser­vices.

Econ­o­mist Dr Ter­rence Far­rell was right on tar­get a few years ago with his as­sess­ment of the pub­lic ser­vice as “an out­dat­ed bu­reau­cra­cy,” where “all the bac­cha­nal is as a re­sult of a set of in­sti­tu­tions from since be­fore In­de­pen­dence and we haven’t changed ...”

The need to re-en­gi­neer and re-en­er­gise is clear. The coun­try is ham­pered by an over­sized, cost­ly and un­der-per­form­ing pub­lic ser­vice. How­ev­er, re­form re­quires ma­jor po­lit­i­cal risks which no gov­ern­ment, past or present, has been will­ing to take.