The University of Guyana Students Society (UGSS) has pulled itself up to its full intellectual height and fired a warning shot across the bow of the ship of state, calling for the government to get its act together, to provide them with facilities deserving of a Twenty First Century higher institution of learning. The first thing the strikes you about the statement issued recently by the Republic’s up and coming brains thrust is its WORDINESS, its impressive parading of language and the chord of menace and militancy which it seeks to strike. Could it be that the real challenge to the Ramotar administration will come not from the hoped-for forging of a collective parliamentary opposition but from “the united voices of five thousand and more dissatisfied students?” Or does the threat of militant action repose solely in the elegance of the language that shapes the students’ pronouncement?
Whether or not the facility at Turkeyen actually qualifies to be termed a higher institution of learning has been a matter of vigorous discourse for several years now. Not a few public commentators have equated the institution with some of those now disappearing tenement yards where feisty women hang their ‘smalls’ on clothes lines that you have to duck under dripping ‘fine clothes’ if you are passing through; where CUSS WORDS mark adolescents’ earliest encounters with language and where humans co-exist and, somehow, actually survive amidst a host of deadly vermin.
To continue in the tenement yard vein THE POWERS THAT BE have come to be seen as SLUM LORDS who pay periodic visits to what Martin Carter would call their ‘Nigger Yards’ to collect their rent, avoiding the quizzical stares of half-naked children with RING WORM and to find ways of persuading the inhabitants of these hell-holes that something will be done to improve their lot soon.
UG is one of the black marks against the Jagdeo Administration. All the talk about LCDS, and OLPF and IT as yardsticks with which to measure national development count for little when we have not even managed to make the University a habitable place far less provide those finer things in life like HOT SPOTS and all of the other amenities that the students are now asking for.
It’s THE POLITICS! Not Political Science as an academic discipline but the kind of low-life, divisive politics that has held the University in its grip for so many years and to which so many of our academics subscribe. One has to ask oneself whether the real purpose of the University of Guyana is to produce an intellectual corps that will run the country down the road or whether it is not intended purely to serve as a kind of intellectual gymnasium where politicians, many of whom would not recognize academia if it were to drop on their heads, can flex their muscles from time to time.
Surely, rescuing UG from what threatens to be a worse-than-death fate has to be one of the primary challenges of the Ramotar administration! One Lap Top per family alone can’t cut it! OK, if you have a Lap Top in your home you can learn to type in Microsoft Word and surf the Internet and play around on FACEBOOK but there is much more to IT than that and the courses in Computer Science and other IT-related disciplines have to be provided by the University of Guyana.
Recall that when Vice Chancellor Carrington touched down in Guyana a few years ago his suitcases were filled with optimism and his face bore the expression of a man up to the challenge. No doubt he might have been warned by colleagues that he was about to enter a minefield. But perhaps he thought he saw something that nobody else did. He saw, it seems, some hope that if he could take the tribulations of dealing with the government in his stride and look to the private sector to help him build a University, then perhaps some good might come of it. Not so. Little seems to have emerged from his high-profile encounter with the Private Sector Commission shortly after he came here. OK UG has gotten a bit of help from GT&T and other private businesses but on the whole the engagement with the private sector is yet to become a full-fledged marriage. The fact of the matter is that our private sector has grown so accustomed to hoppin pun one foot that it has now grown quite used to its impediment of scarce skills. As for the government there is really little evidence that it has ever been really pro-active about training public servants. True, public servants go off to UG pretty much on their own and study pretty much what they please after which they come back and clamour for promotion. On the whole, however, promotion in the Public Service is pretty much a matter of attrition (if you stick around long enough you get promoted) rather than competence; hence the reason why we now have Permanent Secretaries who are hard-pressed to construct fairly complex sentences.
Where the UG problem comes in has to do with the army of graduates who, each year, enthusiastically kiss goodbye to Turkeyen, running off with their degrees, diplomas and certificates to parade their qualifications and apply for non-existent jobs and, after a long enough interregnum of no replies or NO VACANCIES replies, badger their relatives in the diaspora to set them up in one form of business or the other. Meanwhile, the authorities continue to spin you their yarn about the glories of a University Education while the tenement yard syndrome goes on and on with no sign of anything remotely resembling change.
