Another threat to national well-being

Rather than choosing to borrow so as to spend on these items, the PNM has chosen to borrow large sums so as to “fix” the nation’s Budget deficit. That money will be pumped into the hands of bankers to the detriment of the people.

Rather than opt for the preservation of GATE and the shoring up of the education sector, Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley has chosen to deprive the people whom he persuaded to support his election and opt instead to fatten foreign and local bankers through injudicious borrowing to further burden taxpayers.

Having embarked on that trajectory of State failure, he will, if he hasn’t already, find that his borrowing will inevitably increase.

The PNM historically has paid just lip service to the creation of a viable education sector in this country. The same can be said of its treatment of the health sector.

Its commitment to both these sectors has been superficial, self-contradictory, chaotic and largely born out of the need for political one-upmanship. My focus will be on the nation’s education sector.

The 1984 Marge Report, commissioned by the Ministry of Education, alerted the then PNM government to the absolute imperative for “special education.” Joan Pedro and Dennis Conrad (2006) re-emphasised this dire need and even went as far as suggesting that that government had failed to recognise the vital importance of that need for this country’s development.

The University of the West Indies can also be accused of dragging its feet in this regard.

Up to today, as a nation, we haven’t learned the lesson of the PNM’s negligence through its habit of not keeping its manifesto promises.

The nation ignored the fact that party, as far back as 1980, had “mamaguyed” the population by exhibiting sham concern for “equity” in education by proclaiming its “commitment” to special education.

Today, after scuttling the hopes and aspirations of countless numbers of citizens who hoped to raise their boats with the rising tide of economic prosperity through the acquisition of a better education, this vie-qui-vie administration that cannot see beyond the tips of its collective noses, has imposed a further threat to the national well-being.

Rowley’s Minister of Education is stifling the education of “special needs” children by reducing the funding of private schools established for that purpose and enhanced by the last government.

The resultant surge in criminality will confront Rowley and his PNM Government (and the nation) because of the thousands of children whose inalienable rights they have willfully and unlawfully chosen to disregard.

They will, when that time comes, in desperation join forces with equally blind social commentators and erstwhile academics.

They will in the face of escalating criminality, hatch some ill-founded and half-baked plan for “affirmative action” in the name of “equity” in education. Is it any wonder that David Rudder can remind us in song that “half the nation is mad?” Or that Funny can tell us that “yap, yap and blah, blah” are all that (PNM) politicians do?

Steve Smith via email