Dear Editor,
Let me preface what I have to say by acknowledging the decade-long friendship I’ve enjoyed with Minister of Education Priya Manickchand. I have no doubt about the Minister’s personal commitment to the betterment of Guyana and, more importantly, I have every confidence in her professional competence to effectively run the ministry under her portfolio, given the opportunity to do so. But there comes a time when persons like Minister Manickchand, the precious few left in government, have to realize that their values and their ability are completely undermined by and subsumed into the collective incompetence that is the PPP at present.
The morality argument on the use of pirated textbooks is not one completely without merit – it’s something that poorer families use all the time when they go to a corner copy-shop and make a copy of a book. What is less credible, however, is the government doing it, and on such a massive scale, to the tune of over US$600,000, when it is clearly illegal, and in the absence of a written policy that would have evolved subsequent to failed negotiations with publishers, an inability to come up with viable alternative funding initiatives (a National Book Fund for example), and abortive attempts at the production of local texts.
That very moral expedience defence, based on the Minister’s logic, can be used by the poor father in Sophia who has attached an illegal connection, or tampers with a meter, in order to run the fridge he keeps the food he feeds his four school-age children, the television they use to watch the government’s Learning Channel, and the OLPF netbook on which they type their school assignments. Yet the government-run GPL still has inspection and disconnection crews roaming impoverished neighbourhoods across Guyana on a daily basis.
And that is simply the abstract rhetoric against the Government of Guyana’s position. If the government is going to make the case for fiscal responsibility as offered by the Head of the Presidential Secretariat, then it has to make the case that the price differential between the legitimate textbooks and the pirated ones is greater than the sum of money lost in the far too numerous examples of government profligacy, from shoddy public work projects (pick a wharf, bridge, road), to poorly managed capital investments (Fip’s Road, the Skeldon Factory) and clear-cut cases of corruption.
The average bid price for the textbooks was somewhere in the range of about $180,000,000 or US$900,000. Let’s assume a generous pricing differential of about $40,000,000 or US$200,000 between the cost of the official books and the cost of the photocopied books: fiscal responsibility, ‘moral’ disregard of copyright, or whatever you want to call it, is expected therefore to save Guyana US$200,000 in the procurement of textbooks.
Consider, in comparison, government’s insistence on contorting itself in handing Fip Motilall – an unqualified contractor who had not built so much as a shortcut – a US$15.4 million contract which the good HPS himself, Dr Luncheon (obsessed with best quality for the lowest price) now says will cost much more because of Motilall’s incompetence. If that additional cost is more than US$200,000 (the textbook procurement differential) then there is no moral or fiscal case to be credulously made for skimping on the procurement of textbooks.
It is amazing that the Government of Guyana is selling a Field of Dreams rationale (‘If you build it, they will come‘) for investing billions of dollars in the Marriott Hotel, which is going to benefit at best a handful of nebulous investors, yet refuses to make that same argument for a much smaller investment in education which is going to benefit our children.
You’re either rich enough to invest in a Marriott hotel, or you’re too poor to buy original textbooks for the nation’s children – you cannot have it both ways.
Finally, anyone who has had sufficient expertise in the printing industry would recognize that there is a pricing threshold that you cannot go below without compromising quality. No printer in Guyana can produce books at a competitive enough quality, “close to the original,” without going above the price of the original printed elsewhere. Because we do not have the critical mass or jobbing demand necessary to support a viable printing/publishing industry, we simply do not have the quality of equipment and expertise to bring production costs down – that is why local magazines like GEM, Horizons and Apsara, even with shipping costs factored in, print in Trinidad or Barbados, despite distributing here primarily. It is why the Ministry of Culture did not do the supposedly “fiscally responsible thing” and tender out the production of the Guyana Classics series here, opting to produce them overseas instead. Of all the bids offered for the recent procurement, Pavnik Press’ high bid of $256, 831, 211 was the most realistic considering the tender document’s ‘quality’ stipulation.
If we were to use that hypothetical father mentioned earlier as a metaphor for the Government of Guyana, he’d be a belligerent and ignorant drunk who favoured one child over the others; who built unnecessary rooms that his unfavoured children would never get to go into; who owned and drove several fancy cars, but when it came time to get his slighted children equipped for school, said that he didn’t have enough money to buy original textbooks and sent them to his shady friend with a photocopy shop to copy those textbooks – and then somehow had the children pay for all of it.
The Government of Guyana has to get serious about copyright – without copyright reform, you cannot be taken on the word of even your impoverished pronouncements about literary development and you might as well scrap the Guyana Prize; without copyright reform, the music industry will never get off the ground; without copyright reform, the tardy but still laudable attempts at creating a local film industry will flop. If you can say as a government that you’re not ready for copyright reform, you are not ready for the 1960s much less the 21st century.
Yours faithfully,
Ruel Johnson
