Misspending education dollars

It is completely scandalous that the Minister of Education should have gotten $14.8 million for entertainment, publicity, hosting, and overseas travel in the 2005-2006 Budget. In a system where half the students fail the CXC examinations in key subjects, this is clearly money that can be better spent in other areas. Nor can the Government argue, as its spokesmen have done in relation to national security, that this amount does not take away from other areas — money wasted is wasted money. The total sum allocated in the Budget for these purposes is $229 million. This might be a reasonable total although, in raising this issue during the Budget debate, Opposition MP Kamla Persad Bissessar noted that in 2001, the UNC regime had allocated a mere $11.8 million for the same expenditures.

It will be interesting to find out what has changed in the past four years for the PNM Government to need an extra $217 million for entertainment, overseas travel, hosting and publicity. It would be even more interesting to discover what Hazel Manning needs $14.8 million for. After all, an Education Minister does not need to travel as much as, say, Ministers and technocrats from the Trade or Finance Ministries. Even expenditures on hosting and entertainment should be considerably less for her Ministry. Yet, instead of explaining herself, Mrs Manning said that it was the UNC government that had taken a loan from the IDB in order to market reforms in the education sector.

We fail to see the relevance, but in any case Mrs Manning has hardly been spending the money from this loan in a productive manner. Ask any average citizen what market strategy they connect to the Education Ministry, and they would most likely point to the full-page full-colour print ads that usually feature a very large photo of a smiling Mrs Manning. Ask the average citizen what they know about the Education Ministry’s reforms, and they would probably respond with a blank stare. Even the self-same ads are heavy on photos and short on text — with that text giving just the highlights of PR activities rather than information about substantive reforms.

The five billion that has been allocated to education may hide a multitude of sins, but the sins nonetheless remain. These include students’ high failure rate, delinquent and untrained teachers, backward curricula, school violence, and inadequate infrastructure. Mrs Manning is on record as having washed her hands of responsibility for all these issues, preferring to blame the public servants and technocrats instead. In respect to the infrastructural matter, a letter from Jo-Ann Murrel, president of the Trinidad and Tobago Institute of Architects, asserts that the slow pace of the Schools Construction Programme, which the Education Ministry has blamed on architects, is really the fault of the Ministry officials, who have been tardy in finalising design briefs and slow in paying the architects for their work. This may lend support to Mrs Manning’s contention, but not to her position since it is  the Minister who is ultimately responsible for her Ministry.

That this simple principle should escape Mrs Manning, however, is not surprising. After all, she occupies her position solely because of nepotism. And, since Section 29 of the Integrity in Public Life Act 2000 forbids the Prime Minister from making any decision that would advance the interests of a family member, it seems that there is a good case here for the Integrity Commission to investigate. There is also a good case for the Commission to investigate whether advertisements that promote the Minister rather than the Ministry’s reforms do not constitute misspending of public funds. Why the Commission has taken no action on either or both of these issues remains a matter of conjecture. At the very least, though, we can hope that in the coming fiscal year, Mrs Manning will use her large publicity budget to provide information that actually informs citizens about the education sector.