And in our continuing look at the public life of Sir Manuel - we dug into our archives for an important interview. This is the one right after the Government had announced that it was retrenching hundreds of public officers as a cost cutting measure.
And the Esquivel Administration did that in December, at Christmas of all times! It's a policy decision that lives in infamy - but looking at it with the benefit of retrospection - we can see that it says something important about Esquivel's thought process.
He was a fundamentally pragmatic thinker - and he just felt it would be best if people knew before Christmas that they would be losing their jobs so that they spent their Christmas money wisely. Here's how he put it in an interview with Audrey Matura in December of 1995:
Rt. Hon. Manuel Esquivel, Prime Minister, December 1995
"It's been 7 weeks of uncertainty and people not knowing what would be their fate, what would be their future and we thought that at the earliest possible moment that the exercise was finished whenever that occurred, people had a right to know whether they would be staying on or they would be leaving. It is unfortunate that all of this occurs in December, that I feel that a person would rather know than not know and hence we took that choice."
