NO MORE $10,000 FOR THE BIG SHOTS

Aug 22, 2015 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

The mistake that governments make is to give money to all parents to help send their children to school. Once you start that, people will come to expect it to continue, and if you have to stop the payments, people will get annoyed.
Right now thousands of parents in Guyana are annoyed that the APNU+AFC administration has stopped the $10,000 per year grant that was offered last year by the PPP. Parents are not just unhappy. They are blue mad; they are vexed. They are annoyed. They are complaining that they do not have money to send their children to school for the new school year. They use the fact that business is stagnated to press their case that they need the return of the $10,000 per child school grant
The new government has found itself highly unpopular because of the cancellation of the grant. APNU+AFC has been trying to defend the cancellation of this grant by pointing fingers at the PPP, indicating that a committee had decided just before the elections that the grant was unsustainable.
It is however not the PPP that cancelled the grant. It is the new government, and therefore the PPP cannot be blamed for the cancellation, even if they too would have discontinued it.
APNU+AFC does not need to be pointing at any assessment done by the PPP. APNU+AFC does not need to justify its decision to discontinue the grant. There was never any justification for the grant, and therefore it should be deemed indefensible.
Not because parents are upset at not receiving the $10,000 per child this year means that the new government has to be defensive. It does not.
Guyanese love freeness. Multimillionaires turned up to collect the $10,000. People who could afford to transport their children to school by chauffeur turned up to collect the $10,000.
Instead of spending billions of dollars on that grant, the PPP should have identified the top secondary schools in Georgetown and provided some big buses to transport students from these schools who live outside of Georgetown. That would have solved two problems. It would have solved the transportation problem for the children and it would have reduced the traffic on the roads during peak hours.
Instead of doling out $10,000 to every school child, the government should have used that money to provide a bus service to school children.
The new government, therefore, is perfectly in order to stop the school grant. It did the right thing and it should not have to point out what the PPP planned to do in order to justify its decision.
But the new government has also made a mistake. It has increased the uniform grant to $2000 per month. Here again, multi-millionaires are going to collect this uniform allowance. $2000 cannot outfit any child for school, not even a nursery school child. It is therefore an insult for this amount to be offered to parents.
The uniform allowance should be increased to $10,000 per child, but it should be restricted only to those parents who cannot afford to outfit their children. It should be for those who are extremely poor. The teachers in the schools should be asked to identify the neediest students. There should be a means test.
It is only to these parents that the $10,000 should be paid, not to everyone, including the multi-millionaires who can afford to send their children to school in the most expensive sneakers and tweed.

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NO MORE $10,000 FOR THE BIG SHOTS

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