By KNEWS

Copyright kaieteurnewsonline

The weight of paper and people

Sep 16, 2025
Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Kaieteur News – The local public service is a curious machine. It feeds itself daily on billions, grows fat on its own inefficiencies, and yet insists that it exists for the purpose of serving the public.

We nod and accept this because what else can we do? The truth is that the public service is a vast contraption of clerks, bosses, advisers, and retired politicians living out a second pension on the taxpayers’ dime. It has ceased to be about service. It has become about itself.

But the Public Service Ministry is now been rebranded as the Ministry of Public Service and Government Efficiency. The name is optimistic, almost comic. Efficiency is not something you associate with the public service. Efficiency has to be infused into an ailing public service, like medicine to a sick patient.
And yet here we have a new Minister. His is the most difficult of all Ministers: to bring order to disorder, clarity to clutter, service to an institution known for disservice.

The trouble lies not in the rhetoric but in the reality. For decades the public service has been bloated with sinecures—comfortable chairs filled by men and women whose only qualification is loyalty to the ruling party or gratitude for past political service. They are not there to answer telephones, process licenses, or design systems. They are there because the political class believes the best way to honour loyalty is with a salary, a desk, and a title. It is a form of state-sponsored retirement, paid from the pockets of taxpayers.

The local public service has never been celebrated for an ethic of service. Too often it is known instead for indifference, delay, and a culture that prizes process over outcome. This reputation is not helped by the presence of some staff members who lack the basic skills or temperament for their posts.

Here lies the contradictions. One cannot reform a service while continuing to stuff it with ornamental appointments and degutting the public service of incompetents.

The ordinary citizen knows this well. He sees it when he stands in a line, clutching a form, waiting for the blessing of some clerk who delights in stamps and signatures. He sees it when he returns, weeks later, to be told that another department must approve the paper, and another after that. Behind each layer of delay is not merely inefficiency but design. The red tape is not accidental—it is cultivated. It grants small officials great power. It creates a world in which a favour must be begged, in which the system may be bent but never simplified.

And all of this comes at staggering cost. Nearly a billion dollars a day flows into this bureaucracy. It is a sum so vast that one scarcely grasps it, except to know that it is ours, taken from our taxes, our fuel, our bread. The service exists, in theory, to ease the lives of citizens. In practice, it impoverishes them.

The new Minister is asked to cure this with digitization, with apps and websites. But what use is an app when the real problem is not technology but bloat? A digital form submitted to three different departments is still three forms too many. A pensioned politician twiddling his thumb all day is still unnecessary. Efficiency is not found in gadgets. It is found in pruning.

Yet pruning is precisely what the Minister cannot do. To trim the bureaucracy is to confront the political class. To remove sinecures is to remove friends of the party. The Government has no appetite for this fight. Reform is a word used to charm the public, not to unsettle the ruling elite.

So, we find ourselves in the familiar position: a new Minister with a new brief. But the sun will not rise on a service so deeply entrenched in its habits. The contradiction is too sharp. As long as the public service is treated as a retirement home for the faithful, no reform can take root.

This is the quiet tragedy of governance. We live with a system that consumes our resources, frustrates our patience, and rewards inefficiency. We are told that change is coming, but change never arrives. Instead, more names are added to the payroll, more retirees are given desks, more advisers are tucked into ministries where their advice is neither sought nor needed. The service grows; the service slows.

Perhaps one day, in some future administration, there will be courage enough to cut rather than to add, to serve rather than to shelter. Until then, the Ministry of Public Service Government Efficiency will remain a contradiction in terms: a grand title pinned to a patient that refuses the cure.

advisers, bosses, clerks, local public service, Peeping Tom