Dear Editor,
A news item about toilets not functioning in a West Coast Demerara school is symptomatic of a regional system that never fails to disappoint us over and over, and has been designed to fail. The regional system was supposed to serve people in their regions to get all Government services efficiently, not regionalize corruption, create unresponsive bureaucracies, and send people on a merry go-round.
The current inefficient and ineffective design of the Regional Ministry being charged with carrying out works for the maintenance of schools and other government sectors in the regions including being responsible for the “Education Department” schools and dorms in the regions outside of Georgetown, needs to be dismantled immediately. It’s a poor way of running Government when an entire Ministry, lacking in the skill sets and technical expertise in managing education, is allowed to hold schools to ransom. If schools need a light bulb or need to fix broken windows or broken faucets and toilet fixtures, they have to wait on the regional system to get these things done. These tasks fall in the laps of regional officials such as the Regional Executive Officers and Regional Chairmen. Schools are at the mercy of these folks with their own agendas, “bureaupathic” ways of operating, and potential skullduggeries that does Guyana no good. Nothing moves quickly!
Schools deal with thousands of children on a daily basis and emergency needs occur all the time. Our systems need to be super-responsive to calls from schools for immediate and urgent assistance. Schools cannot wait. They always have to respond to student needs speedily. But when things are in the hands of the regional system and their folks, nothing is going anywhere fast. When faucets don’t work, toilets don’t flush, and buildings are not painted, it’s not always the Ministry of Education that is to be blamed. Most often it is Regional officials operating on “Guyana Time” when they should be operating on “US Visa Application Appointment Time.” Sloth and lack of response, as is the norm, bedevils the Regional Ministry, and the new, inexperienced Ministers there, cannot fix that “humpty dumpty.”
So, when things don’t work, it’s not that it’s always the case that there is weak school leadership or lapses on the part of education officials, most of the time you ask for help until you are blue, and if you are lucky someone will respond to you. “Rapid response” is not something the Regional Ministry understands.
So, I urge the Government and parliament to reform a largely useless regional system, or exempt education from such a rotten arrangement whereby schools can be directly run by the Ministry of Education, instead of being under the management of an ineffective and inefficient regional system. When the regions award multiple contracts to the same people, the contractor is simply lacking in capacity to do concurrent repairs and maintenance in all the regional schools in a timely manner. And students and teachers are made to suffer for a bad design for running government. As we talk about constitutional reform, let’s either fix the regional system or dismantle it in favour of modern systems for rapid decision making and program implementation. The Regional System, “as is,” is a “goadie” the country has to carry, and that’s not good. Let’s revamp and reform the system now! Simply saying our system is bad and our not fixing it, is insanity.
Sincerely,
Dr. Jerry Jailall
Civil Society Advocate
