By David A Granger
The University of Guyana will observe its 50th anniversary two years from now in 2013. Will that anniversary be a celebration of achievement as a centre of academic excellence or will it be a charivari of complaints about underfunding, understaffing, under-equipping and underperformance?
The campuses of the University of the West Indies in other Caribbean countries – such as those in Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados – have become platforms for the new scientific and entrepreneurial élites which are leading their countries’ economies into the new millennium. The University of Guyana, if it is to join that élite club and if this country is ever to compete with its sister Caribbean Community states, deserves better treatment by the Ministry of Education.
The call for increased funding as expressed in the leaked confidential Report to the Council by the Vice-Chancellor and the responses by the Minister of Education and the Pro-Chancellor to the effect that increased funding will be tied to a review of the university’s Strategic Plan suggest that the ministry and the university are on a collision course over the latter’s future. The question is: who will suffer most from the administration’s attitude?
H G Wells wrote several decades ago, “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” Catastrophe will eventually win the contest in this country unless people who are serious about education take control of the situation.
Education is essential to a nation’s survival and success yet, every year, thousands of boys and girls drop out of primary and secondary schools in this country. Some of those who remain are unlikely to be functionally literate or numerate. Most are unlikely to enter university. The majority of the 17,000 children who wrote the National Grade Six Assessment Examinations failed in all four subjects. The majority of the students who wrote the Caribbean Secondary Examination Certificate still cannot achieve pass grades in English and Mathematics.
The education system is too important to our nation’s future to be held hostage by present-day political duelling between the ministry and the university. Everyone’s freedom is diminished by a system that allows academic apartheid – one that hampers or hinders the education of young people, even in a not-so-top university.
Education, at the elementary level, used to be aimed at training local masses to function at the lowest levels of the colonial system. The world has changed. Young people now need to be educated in the sciences, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and commerce to enable them to pursue private enterprise rather than rely on the state for employment. Young people now need to be educated not only at the primary and secondary levels but also at the tertiary level in order to overcome the challenges of the new millennium. Our national university is at the heart of our national education system and it must be adequately funded to change with the times.
Employment is the main means by which people make their living. Social change in Guyana in the late 20th century, however, instead of enhancing the education of the individual, seems to have started to make the country a caricature of plantation society of the 18th century. Too many young people today, owing largely to the deficiencies in the education system, are being forced into employment in the proliferation of personal services instead of joining the educated élite to transform Guyana’s economy.
Guyana is not an island. It is part of a world in which communication technology and economic interdependence have transformed human life swiftly. Some highly-educated societies, even small countries like ours, have succeeded in providing a higher quality of life for their citizens through the adoption of modern technologies for information and education. We can do the same.
Why then should the administration be so blind to the shoddy conditions on the university’s campus? Why should the administration be so deaf to the complaints even from its own appointed vice-chancellors? The administration’s strategy seems to have been merely to maintain its control of the Council and to obstruct the transformation process. In this way, it keeps the university on life support without providing adequate resources to allow it to pursue an autonomous path of academic development.
The ministry-university collision has had repercussions at the Cyril Potter College of Education and throughout the education system. Dereck Bok’s well-known aphorism – “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance” – is relevant here. The ministry has adopted a ‘cheapo’ approach to funding the university. The result has been that ignorance – in the form of indiscipline and anti-social behaviour − has been increasing in the schools and throughout the national educational system.
What then should be the purpose of a national university? What will our national university be like when it celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2013? Should our university not pave the way for empowering a new enterprising generation of young people who could pursue the good life in a free nation?
Education is an entitlement funded from the public purse. It is not the benefaction of an indulgent government. If citizens fail to safeguard that entitlement, this country could end up in a state of educational apartheid – two separate societies – one educated and empowered and the other uneducated, unemployed and poor.
Is this what we want for Guyana?
The AFC has a vision for a better society
(An edited version of AFC Leader Khemraj Ramjattan’s
presentation at the UG debate)
Let me say at this initial stage that we Guyanese will have a better grasp of what has to be done only when we are prepared to honestly assess where we are. The AFC sees sense in describing our country as a fragile democracy (an elected dictatorship for some). I personally prefer a recent description – “sultanistic” – by Professor Jack Goldstone of George Mason University’s School of Public Policy.
Apart from a degenerate political state of affairs, the hard cold facts as to the state of our economy must be told. These were strikingly revealed in the Guyana Investment Climate Assessment Report No. 35951 – GY dated June 21, 2007, a document of the World Bank. This report revealed why, although so many hundreds of millions of US dollars were poured into this country, the benefits of growth were non-existent. And why over 35% of Guyanese live in poverty. This is what is on page viii of the Report where the Bank adopted the World Economic Forum index rankings.
1. Pervasiveness of money laundering through banks – Guyana’s ranking: 117 out of 117 countries
2. Brain drain – Guyana’s ranking: 117 out of 117 countries
3. Reliability of police services – Guyana’s ranking: 116 out of 117 countries
4. Centralization of economic policy-making: 115 out of 117 countries
5. Irregular payments on public contracts: 114 out of 117 countries;
In the Getting Credit Index from the World Economic Forum our ranking turned out to be 145 out of 155 countries. And in the case of our Corruption Perception Index, it was 121 out of the 163 countries surveyed. The source was Transparency International. Suffice to say we did badly on all fronts.
These statistics are a consequence not of our people being innately without capacity. It is very well known, given half a chance, that once our Guyanese go overseas they perform, they accomplish, they generate great wealth for themselves and those other societies. These statistics are a consequence of sultanistic rule in the majority of years since Independence.
In 2008 I coined the term control-freakism as the PPP administration’s new ideology and praxis. Control, absolute control is all it wants – in Parliament, on state radio and television, at UG, in the court system, in GuySuCo through its Board selection, in the rice industry through rigged elections in RPA, in the mining and logging industries through new regulations which will adversely affect 100,000 persons and more. Even the truth this government wants to control, when its Sultan without any legitimate reason fails to call inquiries into the Clico debacle, into the Phantom Squad, into the massive over-spending of his overseas trips, into the actual value of his pension package, into the maladministration of NIS which has seen a multitude of Guyanese, who having worked so hard, not being paid their entitlements.
What does all of this mean? It means inequality! And the result of inequality is distrust and mistrust and a general disequilibrium. Every ethnic community has felt the impact of this inequality.
AFC’s vision
As against this scenario, the AFC has a vision for a better society. Underpinning this vision are twelve interconnected approaches that must be followed simultaneously. These approaches involve civil service reforms, political reforms, ethnic equality, personal security, transformation of the production structure of the economy, diaspora involvement, private sector driven economy, youth development, education reform, Hinterland development, gender equality and foreign policy reform.
This transformation will centre on industrial development in manufacturing alumina in the bauxite sector; production of bio-fuels; agro-processing; investing more wisely in sugar to permit the emergence of co-generation and ethanol production at all the existing factories; expansion of rice producing lands; diversifying into jewellery-making for the regional and international market rather than just raw gold production; education reform to meet the developmental needs of the country by emphasizing the STEM areas – science, technology, engineering and mathematics and the establishment of tech-voc schools in all regions; the creation of a State Development Bank to facilitate the capitalization of our struggling entrepreneurs and young ones who may want to enter into businesses. We intend to mobilize all Guyanese for this task. Moreover, we see the diaspora as playing an integral part in financing our economic plans and providing technical and educational assistance. Foreign private investments will be encouraged to establish production linkages with Guyanese producers and infuse new management systems and technologies into Guyana.
The AFC commits itself to acting differently in its conduct of public affairs. Firstly, no one in any sector will be victimized because of his or her political orientation. Furthermore, we will not use the state’s resources to stifle one set of businesses while only promoting the interests of friends and family – we intend to make the economic space free and fair for all investors.
Secondly, we promise the masses jobs rather than hand-outs and tokens for the purpose of vote-buying.
Thirdly, there will be security reforms – murderers and bandits and corrupt officials will be caught and prosecuted. The police force will be finally reformed by taking up the assistance from the British ($1.6B), and Americans (a DEA office) that this PPP government turned down.
Fourthly, there will be transparency and fairness in the public accounts and procurements.
Fifthly, implement the Freedom of Information Bill and the Broadcasting Bill.
Sixthly, have a major overhaul of our constitution, especially amending the electoral system to ensure more accountability from our parliamentarians, and removing the powers of the president.
Seventh, reduce VAT to 12%, increase the tax threshold to $50,000 and grant an increase to public servants and sugar workers of 20% with a lower PAYE rate of 25%.
Eight, cut commercial corporate tax to 30% and non-commercial tax to 25%.
This AFC state will engage in self-limiting behaviour of its own by widely dispersing the bases of political power throughout society. This means devolving responsibilities for policy-making and governance from the state to organizations in local communities and civil society.
But there is a challenge the AFC will have to address frontally which matters fundamentally to our demographic circumstance. And it is this: delivering a Guyanese peace and happiness across the ethnic divide. We have to get to the point of reconciliation and harmony and unity; to the point of transcending ethnic gravitations.
A Guyanese peace, lest we forget, will not be built upon empty and half-empty stomachs or human misery or marginalization of any section of her population. Our people and us politicians must do everything in our power to create a more enduring trust between all our ethnicities, and for the provisioning of opportunities for all to earn decent incomes, and the education and training that lead to such jobs, and a combined commercial and political will to enforce our labour laws and tax laws that will restore a balance of the distribution of the nation’s wealth after a successful generation thereof.
This is the alternative the AFC presents. An alternative which will see its young population blurring all boundaries of race and ethnicity as we know them today, and this still young nation being comfortable in its diversity and even stronger for it.
Students all, our tomorrow depends on what choices we make today. 2012 will depend on what we do in 2011. We cannot do the same thing and expect change. It is that simple We must change to move forward! I plead that you make the right turn and get on board the Alliance For Change to take you there.
