The Tribune

By RICARDO WELLS

Tribune Staff Reporter

rwells@tribunemedia.net

FOREIGN Affairs Minister Darren Henfield yesterday revealed that his office has requested that all foreign service workers appointed by the Christie administration "tie up their offices" by late July, as the Minnis administration prepares to soon name their replacements.

Admitting that there is no clear timeline in place for any official transition, the North Abaco MP in a brief interview outside of Parliament Monday, said his office has already received "customary" letters of resignation from most of the foreign workers appointed by the former government.

"We have not yet determined who will be appointed to our foreign missions, but we have received, as customary (and) as conventions require, those who were appointed by the former government, ambassadors and the like, to have sent their resignations," Mr Henfield told reporters during the House of Assembly's lunch recess yesterday.

"… Those have been accepted by the prime minister," he added. "We are going to in short order, the budget is before us, we have to determine the budget before we move on to other business. That is what we are in the process of doing at the moment."

Last month, shortly after the Free National Movement (FNM) was elected to office, party Chairman Sidney Collie indicated that the FNM would begin making appointments to government boards, committees and diplomatic posts in two to three weeks.

Mr Collie, a member of the administration's transition team, at that time said the party's "first order of business" was to get to Parliament and approve its initial budget; subsequent to which the party had proposed to make its appointments.

The government commenced debate on the 2017-2018 Budget last Wednesday.

The party plans to borrow more than $720m to cover a period of two fiscal cycles - $322,462,707m will be borrowed for the 2017-2018 budget cycle and $400m to satisfy expenditure for 2016-2017 budget.

Mr Henfield yesterday said his ministry had already commenced a "proper manpower assessment" of the foreign service to determine whether it has made "judicious" use of its past allocations.

He suggested that the possibility does exist for downsizing in the foreign service, highlighting the existence of "superfluous" and unmerited contracted workers throughout the service.

"There are some superfluous staff, attaches and the like, that I have asked the technical teams to look at through a proper manpower assessment to see whether or not we were making judicious use of the public expense and some of them we will ask to return," stated Mr Henfield.

He continued: "We will seek to use foreign service workers instead of contracted workers in positions that we think that they can fill. It is what they are trained to do and we think that we can get more mileage out of them in that regard rather than contracting people to be used in the foreign service as attaches and the like."

When it served as the Official Opposition, the FNM was very outspoken on the Progressive Liberal Party's appointments.

Then shadow minister of foreign affairs, former St Anne's MP Hubert Chipman raised concerns about the former government's diplomatic appointments, referring to the administration's approach to them as "drip, drip, helter-skelter announcements."

Several diplomatic posts went unfilled for more than a year.

The new fiscal year will begin July 1.