On Tuesday, September 8, 2026, Kiskadee Watch reported that Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo had summoned Ministers, Permanent Secretaries (PSs) and Regional Executive Officers (REOs) and other state officials to the Arthur Chung Conference Centre, where he warned them of the need for compliance and accountability in the dispensing of procurement services using the resources of the State. This latest calling must have caused the Vice President some angst. It was only in May 2026 that both he and President Irfaan Ali had cause to issue a similar warning to much the same cohort, shortly after the services of nine of the ten REOs had been declared redundant and replacements installed. If the same warnings must continually be issued to the same levels of Government, perhaps the problem is no longer simply whether officials are listening, but whether the system designed to make them accountable is working.
Tucked somewhat quietly behind the Jagdeo warning was another, this time from Minister of Public Service, Government Efficiency and Implementation, Zulfikar Ally. According to the report, Mr. Ally warned that public servants who ‘give citizens a hard time’ will be ‘punished’. It is not clear whether the Minister had fully thought through this particular policy pronouncement. Had he done so, he might have recognised the elephant sitting rather comfortably in the room: when it comes to the indignities routinely visited upon the Guyanese public, his Government itself cannot conveniently stand outside the discussion. Before punishment is dispensed downwards to public servants, there ought to be some examination upwards of the systems, policies and failures that frequently place both citizen and public servant in intolerable circumstances.
Consider the pensioner for whom collecting a measly monthly pension can become a ritual of waiting. Consider citizens standing along road edges waiting for transportation, or passengers squeezed into minibuses whose operators sometimes appear more concerned with reaching their destinations at speed than with getting their passengers there safely. Add to this the travelling public forced to endure deafening music, vulgarity and other excesses because policies are inadequate, existing regulations are inconsistently enforced, or those entrusted with enforcing them simply do not. The customer service delivery by the two public utilities, Guyana Power and Light and Guyana Water Inc., belongs to a past era.
These experiences may appear mundane when considered individually. Collectively, however, they say something about the value placed on the citizen in the everyday organisation of public life. Human dignity is not violated only by an insulting word across a Government counter. It can also be diminished by a system that repeatedly tells citizens, through its inefficiency and indifference, that their time, comfort and safety matter very little.
And herein lies the weakness in Minister Ally’s punishment prescription. What happens when poor service originates not with an impolite clerk but with an inefficient institution? What happens when a public servant is expected to provide satisfactory service through a dysfunctional utility, an overwhelmed health system, an inadequately resourced school or a Government process that was poorly designed in the first place? Who gets punished then? The frontline employee? The Permanent Secretary? The Minister? Or, as is becoming increasingly fashionable now, will the citizen somehow emerge responsible for his or her own inconvenience? If respect for citizens is to become Government policy, then punishment cannot conveniently stop at the lowest rung of the administrative ladder. Accountability, like respect, must travel in both directions.
The cash-grant distributions provide an obvious case study. On more than one occasion, large numbers of citizens, including the elderly, were required to assemble at distribution points and wait under varying conditions to receive what was, after all, public money being returned to the public. People waited while cheques were processed or printed; others adjusted their lives and schedules until Government machinery eventually reached them. Some administrative difficulty is inevitable in an exercise of that scale, but the spectacle also exposed something more fundamental: insufficient planning for the dignity and convenience of the recipient.
In an age of digital banking, electronic records and increasingly sophisticated Government databases, it remains remarkable that the State can speak enthusiastically about digital transformation while citizens must still endure cumbersome physical processes to access benefits for which Government already possesses much of the necessary information. A cash grant should provide relief. The process of obtaining it should not itself become a burden.
But if Minister Ally genuinely wishes to examine the relationship between Government service and human dignity, he need look no farther than the MV Barima tragedy. Nearly two months after the State-owned vessel sank in the Atlantic, the tragedy continues to provide uncomfortable questions about what respect for citizens means when measured not by ministerial pronouncements but by State action. It begins with questions surrounding the condition and seaworthiness of the vessel itself. It extends to the confusion of the early official response, including information presented publicly and subsequently questioned or corrected. It encompasses the circumstances in which Guyanese first learnt, because of the tragedy, that President Ali was outside the country, while the initial absence from public view of Vice President Jagdeo also attracted questions. And it continues through the still-unfolding processes of investigation, accountability and recovery.
That is what makes the Minister’s warning about punishing disrespectful public servants so striking. Disrespect is not exclusively a matter of manners. Human dignity is also a question of how the State treats the people over whom it exercises authority. It is reflected in whether a pensioner must wait unnecessarily, whether a passenger can travel safely, whether a citizen can access public money without being subjected to needless inconvenience, for quality utility services that the citizen must pay for, and, at its most consequential, whether citizens entrusted to a State-owned vessel can reasonably expect that every institution responsible for their safety has performed its duty.
If Mr. Ally intends to make respect for citizens a measure of public service, that would be welcomed. But he should be careful about where he draws the boundary of his new policy. Once Government decides that those who disrespect citizens must be held accountable, the public will reasonably insist that the rule begin at the highest levels of the Government itself.
Discussion