COSTAATT DOCUMENT GAFFE CREATURE OF GOVERNMENT

While the Budget document on COSTAAT was not the first time that ethnic considerations had crept into what was tantamount to declared State policy on education, hopefully the negative fallout will ensure it will be the last.

The decision to incorporate the thinking: “Establish targetted recruitment programmes for male Trinidadians, aged 17 to 24, especially Afro-Trinidadian males” in the Social and Economic Policy Framework 2004 Budget document, was tactless. In turn, it was regrettable that Minister of Science, Technology and Tertiary Education, Senator Danny Montano, and later Planning Minister, Dr Keith Rowley, should have sought to defend its inclusion. Meanwhile, although Prime Minister Patrick Manning has argued, albeit belatedly, that the offending sentence in the document did not represent Government policy, he had erred in waiting a whole week after Opposition Senator Wade Mark had criticised it during the Budget debate before intervening. In addition, Manning’s offered reasoning at a post-Cabinet Press Conference on October 30 — that because it was different to what had appeared in a not dissimilar Budget document last year it was not Government policy — may present some difficulty in digesting. Clearly, the issue was not what had appeared a year ago, but that in question was an official document in circulation since early October which had been exposed and challenged by Wade Mark in the Senate on October 23. It was bad enough, indeed clumsy and certainly inexcusable, that Montano and Rowley had thought it necessary to defend it in Parliament, but the question arises: Why had it taken Manning so long to make a statement denying that it was Government policy?

Nonetheless, the Budget document on COSTAATT, offending phrase et al, once it became part of the record of Parliament, or at least until it was officially withdrawn, was in essence Government policy. It was a creature of Government, and had not strayed into the Parliament records on its own initiative. Because of this, the Prime Minister, as Head of the Government of Trinidad and Tobago, must accept that the ultimate responsibility for the gaffe that the “Afro-Trinidad males” phrase in the Budget document represents, is his. Does he not have advisers? Are there not proof readers and copy tasters at the Government Printery, for example, who should have picked up that a position, open to misunderstanding, had been unwittingly inserted into a Budget document? Mr Manning, apart from being Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, is also Minister of Finance, with responsibility for the Budget. And the Budget, dear readers, is not simply the Speech that Manning read out in Parliament on Monday, October 6, but the documents laid out in the House which serve to flesh out its policy outline. Prime Minister Manning had both a moral and legislative responsibility to the people of Trinidad and Tobago to have condemned the “Afro-Trinidad males” phrase and have it withdrawn and the relevant portion of the document rephrased within 24 hours of Mark’s drawing it to the attention of the Senate, and by extension, the nation. Because it is my policy to consciously avoid contributing to ethnic misunderstanding I shall refrain from referring to a well documented government policy of the early 1950s, which had an unmistakable ethnic flavour under the guise of religion. It was one of the principal contributing factors responsible for the ethnic division that our children and grandchildren are witnessing today. But I have strayed.

Admittedly, there are thousands of Trinidadians of African descent who are at a disadvantage not because they are of African descent but because they are unintended victims of understandable Government policy on illegal immigration. I had pointed to the problem as it affected the children of illegal immigrants in an earlier column. But it bears restating. A few decades ago, Government introduced a policy that all children attending State, State-assisted and private primary schools had to be registered, and had to be nationals or either the children of landed immigrants or persons here on work permits. Illegal immigrants were reluctant to seek to have their children gain admission to primary schools for fear that their (the parents’) immigration status would have been discovered, leading to their being deported. Generations of these children grew up without being able to go to school, to access education, until perhaps their teen years, when they entered adult education classes. Many never even bothered to do so. Unlettered, and with little or no chance at upward mobility, they were demotivated, and sadly enough, in turn demotivated their children. It is a fact of history that most were of African descent. With no formal education, they either performed the most menial jobs in the community, or all too readily fell to the blandishments of drug lords and other criminal kingpins. Their fashions, songs and music were those of the African descent ghettoes of New York. In turn, many of their children would become statistics of the population of school dropouts. Despite this I cannot and will not condone the controversial inserting of the “Afro-Trinidadian males” phrase in the Budget document — “Social and Economic Policy Framework 2004.” It would clearly be remiss of me.