April 15, 2013

Dear Sir,

It was with dismay and a sense of foreboding that I read the report about Donte Hunt’s ‘temporary’ appointment at the office of the rent commissioner. It seems quite unbelievable that with 8,000 people on the government payroll, it was not possible to identify and redeploy someone who has some spare capacity to fill a temporary position. Are we really to believe that all 8,000 are working to full capacity? Or is it the case that out of 8,000 people, no one had the necessary skills to do this job? But Donte Hunt does? If the former, then it doesn’t inspire much confidence in the calibre of those 8,000.

The One Bermuda Alliance should have put an immediate freeze on civil service hiring — even for ‘temporary’ assignments — and should be actively seeking to reduce the size and cost of the civil service. Instead, what do we have? The OBA ‘friends and family plan’ in action? Is this just the same as Progressive Labour Party cronyism with different faces filling the slots? We elected the OBA with the promise (and desperate hope) of change. So far we haven’t seen anything substantively different and some worrying indications that some things won’t change. If our current leaders are not careful, they will find that they have missed the chance to take the drastic action that is required to pull us back from the abyss that we are on the brink of falling into. They’ve had time to look under the hood; now get the repairs going — quickly please.

ELSPETH A BREWIN

Warwick