By Breaking Belize News Staff (HP): Prime Minister John Briceño says the government intends to bring the public service wage bill under control without firing a single worker, relying instead on attrition, and in doing so, he offered one of the frankest assessments of the public service, and the political pressures around it, heard from a sitting Prime Minister in years.
Responding to concerns raised about the ever-growing wage bill, Briceño explained the approach: as public officers retire, government simply may not replace them all. “As people are retiring, you may not necessarily have to bring in people back, and that’s how we would be able to control it without retrenching,” he said, pointing to an ongoing project he believes will help the effort.
But the Prime Minister went further, describing a structural problem in the service itself. “The truth of the matter is that the public service right now is like a pear, you have a small top and the bottom is big,” he said. “Almost every ministry today, they need more people, they need more technical people, and the people at the bottom don’t have the technical expertise.”
His prescription touched the most sensitive nerve in Belizean governance: political hiring. “We need to put something in place whereby we could move these things from the politicians to just hire, ‘Oh, this is my friend or my voter, give them a job,’” Briceño said, acknowledging his own side feels the squeeze. “We’re under tremendous pressure from people who say, ‘You did not go in there and fire the UDP as the UDP did in 2008.’ You know what the then Prime Minister said? ‘To the winner, the spoils.’ That’s what he said in the National Assembly.”
The Prime Minister also disclosed that the government resisted international pressure to cut deeply during the pandemic. “We could have taken the COVID pandemic as an excuse to let go a lot of people. We were told by the IMF to get rid of about 3,000, but we didn’t, because I don’t think it’s fair to take advantage of people who are barely eking out a living,” he said. “You want to deal, deal with the big guys, but not the people out there.”
His stated destination is a service restored to its old footing: “We need to find a system where we could minimize that kind of thing and try to bring back that independence that the public service had before independence and maybe the first years after independence, where it was a completely independent service that can really truly provide the service that is expected from them.”
The candour is notable, and so is the arithmetic. Attrition is the gentlest tool for shrinking a wage bill, but also the slowest, and converting a bottom-heavy service into a technical one will take more than unfilled vacancies. The Prime Minister has named the disease, political hiring, with rare openness. The test will be whether the promised system to cure it ever arrives.
The post PM describes public service as a pear: small top, big bottom appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.
By Breaking Belize News Staff (HP): Prime Minister John Briceño says the government intends to bring the public service wage bill under control without firing a single worker, relying instead on attrition, and in doing so, he offered one of the frankest assessments of the public service, and the political pressures around it, heard from
The post PM describes public service as a pear: small top, big bottom appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.
