Dear Editor,
The Government of Guyana stopped paying the subvention to the Council of Legal Education which allowed Guyanese to attend the Caribbean law schools, notably the Hugh Wooding Law School at a cost of TT$12 500 per academic year.
Guyanese are now required to pay the economic cost along with the tuition fee of TT$61,843, US$9816.35 or G$1,963,270 (see hwls.edu.tt). The government’s justification for the removal of the subvention rested on the quota of 25 students being allotted to Guyana annually at the Hugh Wooding Law School.
Plans to establish a CLE supervised law school in Guyana were developed at the same time as the removal of the subvention and were scrapped shortly after, leaving LLB graduates to come up with four million dollars for tuition fees plus accommodation and travel or forget it.
The government has no loan scheme in place to accommodate the twenty-five graduates per year, and the commercial banks are not friendly towards this level of academic funding either, since a mortgage is required as security for loans for this purpose and there is no grace period for repayment. In these circumstances there ought to be little wonder that public sector legal positions are often vacant.
The Barbados, Trinidad and Jamaican governments have put measures in place to see that their nationals have access to higher levels of education in the law at the CLE schools and on Masters degree programmes; Guyana provides nothing for its citizens in this regard. Whatever the popular opinion about the legal profession, it is still the guardian of the rights and freedoms of the society, (as has been discovered by many a sceptic who found himself in a scrape or two), and needs to be supported in order that some of these safeguards may be maintained and even improved. The government has placed legal education in its worst position since colonial times and this is not good for anyone.
The private sector (commercial banks) and the government ought to do much more to support higher education, as the current scheme of education loans for this purpose is a farce. The so-called liquidity in the banking sector of which they seem to complain might be reduced while supporting the development of the country’s human resources by developing a decent education loans scheme as has been done by the Santander group in Latin America. The Guyana government too, ought to give its citizens access to higher education as a right and not a privilege.
Persons who wish to acquire a legal education must be able to do so through a loans scheme or other measures. The means are there, let’s put them to good use.
Yours faithfully,
A Inniss