Mr. Jagdeo and the PPP are under a misapprehension

Mar 30, 2022 Letters

Dear Editor

An educated population is the means by which a democracy is organised and sustained. It was recently disappointing to read that Guyana’s Vice President said, “If we find 40,000 Guyanese we will pay for them,” and, “we just want all our people to be educated.” Why do the VP and the PPP Government continue to insult the intelligence of the Guyanese people and disown their own record of history?

Readers ought to think critically about what’s being promised by the politician, and the implication of such a remarkable claim by his Administration. Firstly, the Guyanese State derives its revenue primarily from the sale of the country’s bountiful natural resources; but that revenue does not belong to, or is not owned by, the government. Secondly, the natural resource wealth of the country is a birthright that the Guyanese nation have inherited from the colonial power and Kingdom of Great Britain in 1966. Thirdly, Guyana is a republic & democratic state; that means the Government and MPs are merely elected representatives of the people and whose duty it is to act in the interest of the people (they work for you).

Mr. Jagdeo and the PPP are under a misapprehension of consequential proportions. The PPP Government would be wise to remind itself that Article 27 of Guyana’s Constitution, the supreme law, clearly states that “every citizen has the right to free education from nursery to [university]…” – this means that university education is a fundamental and inviolable right of the Guyanese people. Therefore, it was unconstitutional, and also immoral, when the PPP ended free education at Guyana’s only public university in 1994 – during a period when Guyanese were at their most vulnerable – and it’s still unlawful in 2022 for Guyanese to pay to attend their own national university.

It’s a truism that the Guyanese people do not trust either of the two racially derived political parties to award them scholarships in a fair and ethical manner. In fact, no one, except the PPP Government, knows for sure the exact criteria by which an applicant is awarded a scholarship or rejected that award from within the Ministry of Public Service – the process itself has never been transparent or made public, not even under the previous PNC-AFC Administration. Now, as if the picture wasn’t already unflattering, the most bizarre feature that underlies the entirety of the scholarship scheme is the fact that almost all of the universities in GOAL are third world institutes, and are ranked much lower than Guyana’s own national university, by all leading university ranking databases or international ranking metrics, such as uniRank, EduRank, and Webometrics.

Should it not concern the nation and Parliament that the PPP Government is spending billions of dollars from the treasury to fund a dubious scheme such as GOAL et al, instead of righting the historical wrong done to the Guyanese people? Put differently, why isn’t the Government prioritizing tuition free higher education at UG; developing the latter into a world class (top 200 – 500 ranked) university; and transforming its antiquated tertiary education institutes into state of the art polytechnic universities? Certainly money is not the problem for the foreseeable future.

Yours truly,

Joshua Faria

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