CONTENGENCY FEES SHOULD BE REINTRODUCED

Jan 10, 2012 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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If there is anything that signifies why the Regional Administration has been a historic failure in Guyana, it was the recent incident in which a school was found to be in a deplorable condition, unfit for the students to attend.
The Regional administration was an experiment of the PNC regime which was trying to move towards a system that existed in Cuba whereby the country would be divided into regions and each region in turn would be divided into neighborhood communities. This system effectively spelt the end of the ineffective village council which had existed before but which was always going to be more effective than what it was replaced by.
The regional administrative system was intended to work in tandem with a communist organ called the Supreme Congress of the People. That superstructure was done away with through constitutional reform, its aberration, the regional administrative and neighborhood democratic system, patterned after what exists in Cuba, was retained.
It is now time for that entire network to be dismantled because it is an unproductive burden on the State. This is best illustrated by the continuing problems that students face in various schools. In a recent incident the students of a school turned up to find that the school was not in a state of readiness for the new term.
Forget about whose responsibility this is. No one should expect an inefficient and ineffective regional administrative system to be able to deal with a problem of this nature. And of course if you have a delegated system, the central government cannot be held responsible. The root cause of the problem is the overall system which places too many demands on a regional administrative system.
A regional educational officer cannot be expected to physically ensure that every school in his or her region is in a state of readiness for the school term. This is an impossible task. There are far too many schools.
What is needed is a system of community management of schools so that the communities themselves will be allowed to play a role in ensuring that the school is in order. There is no need for a formal arrangement. Councils of management are informally organized, and comprise parents of existing students, persons in the communities, including businesses, and former students of the school (old students association).
Free education does not mean that everything is free. It does not mean that people should not contribute to the upkeep of the schools. Schools must be seen as a national resource, and therefore it is the duty of every student, the parents of those students and the wider community to make a contribution to that school.
Many years ago, there was a system in place to aid the headmistress in the upkeep of schools. It was called contingency fees and was widely seen as a contradiction of free education. But many people complied and kept quiet because in many schools the teachers made this an imposition. You felt that you had to pay.
The government then woke up one day and decided that contingency fees should not be compulsory. Anyone familiar with Guyanese will understand that unless you are compelled to pay money, not many persons were going to pay. And so the system of contingency fees which was used to help upkeep the schools went into decline.
The least that all those parents who receive free education in the form of not having to pay tuition fees, and free books, can do to help the school to which their children attend is to give something back in the form of contingency fees. Asking a parent to pay $2000 per term per student is not unreasonable. Some parents spend more than that on cellular phones each week, so why can’t they give that back as a contingency fee each month.
Many will be appalled by this suggestion because they have been spoilt rotten by the government, which is now providing even uniform assistance to the rich and the poor.
This money should be ploughed back into the schools, and assistance should be only given to the very desperate.
If there is a school of five hundred children and each student gives $2000 per term, then it means that the school will raise some three million dollars per year from contingency fees alone.
With the council of management in place, another three million can be raised and this means that the school can raise at least six million per year.
This would be sufficient to take care of all the needs of the school, including its cleaning. And it will avoid this situation each term, whereby some schools create public headlines because they are in a deplorable state.
In the meantime, do not ask the politicians to get rid of the regional administration system. They are not interested in dismantling that humongous system.

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