Dear Editor,
If a minister can decide who is not to be hired to a public entity, the converse is also true.
On the footing that a minister can so decide, there is nothing to stop him from also deciding who is to be hired or fired or not fired, as the case may be.
I do not agree with the Jamaica Observer editorial of April 7, 2016, praising the Minister of Local Government Desmond McKenzie for causing the National Solid Waste Management Authority to withdraw its job offer to his son.
A prudent minister would have had a private meeting with his son and would have tried to persuade him privately to withdraw his job application.
Any such withdrawal is a matter entirely for his son — a fully formed adult who from all accounts is eminently qualified for the job — not the minister.
A minister must leave day-to-day operations of a public agency to the management of that agency.
He should not interfere and hector any agency into changing management decisions, particularly in matters relating to employment of staff.
What the minister has done with his ill-advised and pandering action is to set a dangerous precedent which, I expect, will be abused in the not so distant future.
Soon we will be having ministers, in this small society, investigating whether one is related in the full blood, the half blood or any other degree of propinquity.
Patrick Delano Bailey
patrick.bailey@btalawjm.com
If a minister can decide who is not to be hired to a public entity, the converse is also true.
On the footing that a minister can so decide, there is nothing to stop him from also deciding who is to be hired or fired or not fired, as the case may be.
I do not agree with the Jamaica Observer editorial of April 7, 2016, praising the Minister of Local Government Desmond McKenzie for causing the National Solid Waste Management Authority to withdraw its job offer to his son.
A prudent minister would have had a private meeting with his son and would have tried to persuade him privately to withdraw his job application.
Any such withdrawal is a matter entirely for his son — a fully formed adult who from all accounts is eminently qualified for the job — not the minister.
A minister must leave day-to-day operations of a public agency to the management of that agency.
He should not interfere and hector any agency into changing management decisions, particularly in matters relating to employment of staff.
What the minister has done with his ill-advised and pandering action is to set a dangerous precedent which, I expect, will be abused in the not so distant future.
Soon we will be having ministers, in this small society, investigating whether one is related in the full blood, the half blood or any other degree of propinquity.
Patrick Delano Bailey
patrick.bailey@btalawjm.com