THE EDITOR, Sir:
YOUR COLUMNIST Heather Robinson has certainly mellowed since the days when she stridently endorsed and was actively engaged in the political turmoil of the 1970s. The mental metamorphosis is much to be admired. Now, she is all the more
likeable.
However, like those wounds she attributes to baking cookies, the scars of wild imaginings seem to linger on. I happened to have been executive director of the Jamaica Information Service (JIS) at the time Miss Robinson claims to have lost her job because of political discrimination.
If that is so, I knew nothing about it; and it could hardly have escaped my notice, because I was personally committed to protecting the livelihood of those employees, including Miss Robinson, who believed that their far-left politics should supersede professional obligations.
Instead of carrying out their assignments, some of them insisted on using the government press to print communist newsletters on government's time, to circulate their contentious publications, even as they did before the change of administration.
In my recollection, Miss Robinson was on study leave when I arrived at the JIS and was speaking to the staff about what was expected of them and what they should expect of my administration.
On that occasion, she left her studies at the UWI, made her way to the meeting and tried to be disruptive. It reached the point where I found it necessary to put her in her proper place; and for this I do not have to rely on my memory. I still have a tape recording of the entire incident. It may have been on account of her confrontational style that she was told to go back to her studies and not return to the JIS (then API) until her leave had expired.
In the weeks following, many of those indoctrinated ideologues, dissatisfied with the result of the general elections, refused to work under the new administration. I got the Services Commission to transfer some of them to other government posts.
Not a single one was ever made jobless. In fact all of them, to my knowledge, went on to become more educated, more balanced and more useful as citizens.
I most certainly would have treated Miss Robinson in the same manner; for it was one important way to restore peace, harmony and productivity at the workplace that had become a haven for political activists in the 1970s.
The public should know that the chief personnel officer (CPO) and his team were never beholden to me, the JIS or any other government department. They act always in their own judgment.
The CPO who Miss Robinson charges with political bias is the same person who had occupied the position during the previous administration. He was not appointed by the JLP and I doubt that he would have taken any recommendation to discriminate against Miss Robinson.
Now that Miss Robinson is more balanced, it may be time for her to admit that in her youth she was a civil servant who did not obey the fundamental rules of her employment; that she once embraced tribal politics and that she considered it part of her business to preach and practise her version of socialism, on the job and while drawing a salary from taxpayers.
If she suffered in any way for such wrongdoing, she is no different from any of us who have paid a price for youthful indiscretions or, shall we say, exuberance.
I am, etc.,
KEN JONES
alllerdyce@hotmail.com
