Gopeesingh: Remove Garcia from office

Gopeesingh’s call, made yesterday at a press conference held at the Office of the Leader of the Opposition, Charles Street, Port-of- Spain, was in response to Garcia’s reasons for scrapping the distribution of free laptops to students entering first form, which was introduced by the previous People’s Partnership government.

Garcia, he said, by his actions in the ministry, has set back the country’s education programme in its entirety.

On Garcia’s claims that laptops bought by the PP government were overpriced, Gopeesingh said that the initial set, procured through a bidding process by the Central Tenders Board (CTB) in 2010, was in the sum of $4,136 a unit.

However, the last set procured in 2014 was at a cost of $2,249 a unit.

Total cost for 96,400 laptops for students, teachers and principals was $306.1 million over the five-year period.

He said at no time did any laptop cost between $12,000 to $15,000 as reported by Garcia.

Noting that Garcia, on Monday, said that Government will buy 12,500 laptops at a cost of $62 million, which means that one laptop will cost about $5,000, Gopeesingh said it was disconcerting to know that even before the CTB has completed the process, the minister was quoting costs.

“Something is fishy about that,” he said.

For Garcia to say that the laptops provided by the previous administration, were of poor quality, Gopeesingh said, was to “cast aspersions” on the companies Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo, two of the top six companies manufacturing laptops.

On Garcia’s claim of no internet or limited access in the schools, Gopeesingh said that in over 125 secondary schools, there was bandwidth ranging from one megabyte to 100 megabytes, with one school having one gigabit.

Under the Secondary Education Modernisation Programme (SE MP) inherited from the previous People’s National Movement administration, he said, that FLOW, the Telecommunications Services of Trinidad and Tobago (TSTT), Greendot and Digicel provided internet access.

This untruth, he said, was enough for Rowley