She’s not divulging the details surrounding her termination but sacked chairman of the Tourism Development Company (TDC), Dennise Demming, says once people don’t understand their roles and responsibilities, they’re going to trip over each other.
After her six-month stint, she is calling for better governance in terms of how state boards execute their functions and said, on reflection, she should have immediately done governance training.
The State Enterprises Performance Monitoring Manual prescribes how a state board ought to function.
According to the manual: “The Board of Directors of the Company performs a specific set of functions which is directed to meet the mission of the Company.
“Its main responsibility lies in planning, monitoring and controlling the activities of the Company to ensure the optimal utilisation of its resources and the achievement of its corporate objectives. It ensures that policies and business decisions taken at the Board level are implemented.”
Demming, whose expertise is in management and communications, said she believed in confidentiality and while many would want to know why she was terminated, she felt she could not break the rules of good governance practice.
In an interview with the Sunday Guardian on Thursday, she said: “Any new board that comes in should have some governance training and after that, they should have a session for the people who are responsible for them so the PS, DPS, minister and ministry officials...so we are very clear about roles and responsibilities.
“And you can’t do that without bringing all the parties together.”
Questioned about the allegations made against her about her inability to work with her board members and line minister, Demming said: “I am not going down that rabbit hole about what happened.”
Instead, she said the country needed to start looking at overall activities and performance.
“To go into a place like the TDC that has had, prior to me going there, has had five years of total instability.
“The first thing you do when coming in is to try and stabilise things and you stabilise things by demonstrating that you are confident in people, that you’re not about to give people instructions for things you don’t really know about.”
However, referring to allegations published in a weekly newspaper, she said: “For (newspaper name called) to get the information they have, a lot of protocol was breached but I am not answering that.”
Asked if she was disappointed with the way things unfolded, she said her only disappointment was that people have not taken action that puts the country on a path to success.
“We are still skirting around things and that is where my disappointment is.”
Tourism needs no more
studies...just start the work
Now bitten by the tourism bug, the owner of Demming Communications said tourism was a dynamic sector.
She said: “It is such an exciting product and I would say it has become close to my heart. But my core competence is in management and communications and those things can apply no matter what the sector you’re dealing with.”
Demming believed there was no need for more tourism studies to be conducted.
Asked if tourism was not given the priority it deserved, she said: “I think it goes back to how Government functions, so Government says the manifesto becomes its policy statement.
The manifesto was very thin on tourism so the advice was to go back to vision 20/20. That is not clear enough. If you want people to do something you need to give them a very clear task and let them do it.”
She said there were five studies taking place when she left. “I don’t know what they’re studying again.
“Inside TDC, the solutions are there, we just have to have the confidence to select what is the starting point and just start the work.”
Flashback
In October 2015, former TDC director Darren Ganga resigned after Tourism Minister Shamfa Cudjoe described the state board as “a runaway horse.”
Under the People’s Partnership, Dr Rupert Griffith, Stephen Cadiz, Chandresh Sharma and Gerald Hadeed served as line ministers.
Hotelier Rajiv Shandilya and former eTeck chairman Brian Frontin were chairmen.