I still don’t know what we, as a nation, want for our collective 62nd birthday, but I’ve decided what I want most for mine: Ah ease. Specifically from our politicians. Because how is it that we eh even make a week past Independence Day yet and our Education Minister is already out here publicly embarrassing us?

It’s bad enough that only 45% of our secondary schoolers earned a full CSEC certificate this year. It’s no less disturbing that the average SEA student scored 50.7% on math and 53.4% on ELA in 2024. Then there’s the fact that, for yet another academic year, the Ministry of Education failed to properly maintain all of the schools under its purview. Did Dr. Nyan Gadsby-Dolly really have to go on national radio to reveal that the person sitting at the head of our education ministry is either very duncy or convinced that the rest of us are?

Let’s rewind for a sec. In case you missed it, the PTA of Mt. Hope Secondary held a protest this week because their school is dangerously dilapidated. They’re not alone, because the Ministry of Education (MoE) inexplicably decided to partially reopen St. George’s College on Monday after 22 months of closure, even though it too reportedly remains full of health and safety hazards.

Naturally, our embattled education minister felt the need to clear the air on what was looking like severe dereliction of duty at the very beginning of a brand new term. That’s how she found herself on I95FM publicly revealing the extent of her ministry’s—and, by extension, her government’s— failure to properly care for T&T’s education facilities.

Speaking specifically to Mt. Hope Secondary, Gadsby-Dolly said a new school building is required at a cost of $200 million. Alas, the government has elected not to spend those funds at the moment and is instead committed to continuously patching up a school that honestly doesn’t look fit for human habitation.

Look at it. One might wonder how a school managed to reach this level of dilapidation in the first place.

We’ll come back to that.

In regards to the wider issue of our disintegrating education facilities (about 39% of which are over 50 years old), Gadsby-Dolly said the money just isn’t there.

Speaking on the morning programme on I95FM, Gadsby-Dolly said the ministry is left with only $150 million for the School Repair Programme after the $5 billion allocation is divided on recurrent and other expenses.

“Most of the budget is tied up in recurrent expenditure, which means the money is primarily used to run the organisations, not for school repairs. That’s why anything related to school maintenance is always constrained by a tight budget,” Gadsby-Dolly said.

Carrington, O. Gadsby-Dolly: $5 budget can’t cover all our expenses. 4th September, 2024. Guardian.

She even went so far as to lay it all out for us in further detail.

“Out of the five billion, 1.5 billion is allocated to running UWI, COSTAATT, UTT, NESC, and YTEP, which are government-funded institutions. This brings us to 3.5 billion. We also have to consider the staff of the Ministry of Education itself, not including teachers, which costs almost another billion dollars—800 million—and scholarships account for another 200 million,” Gadsby-Dolly said.

“So, the money allocated to fix schools is nowhere near five billion; it’s 150 million, and by the time we reach the vacation period, that money is already gone.”

Carrington, O. Gadsby-Dolly: $5 budget can’t cover all our expenses. 4th September, 2024. Guardian.

This is the part where I remind you that when a government minister says something this obviously ridiculous, it’s not because they’re stupid. It’s because they’re betting that their audience is.

Dr. Nyan Gadsby-Dolly has a PhD in Organic Chemistry and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Educational Technology (with Distinction) from the University of the West Indies, eh. She eh dotish.

So, when she sits before a microphone and details the budgetary constraints to a couple of radio announcers and the wider national public, she’s not doing that because she doesn’t know that it’s misdirection. She’s doing it because she doesn’t expect anyone listening to realise that it is.

She knows that it is September 2024 and that the Ministry of Finance is busy preparing the 2025 National Budget. She knows that her ministry has either already submitted, or is in the process of submitting, the necessary information to inform its budgetary allocation for the next fiscal year. So that the Minister of Finance can stand in Parliament next month and tell us all how much money will be provided to her struggling ministry.

She also knows that the amount of money allocated to her ministry for recurrent expenditure and maintenance is a direct reflection of the importance that her government places in our nation’s education sector.

But she doesn’t expect you to grasp that.

When she openly declares:

“The fact is that every education minister has and will be faced with this until and unless we get to a situation where we are able to maintain our schools and upgrade all of our schools in a certain way so that what we deal with is preventative maintenance,” she said.

…

“So, I want to be very clear, and the public must understand this: the amount of money required for school repair is simply not available. That has been a situation for some time in Trinidad and Tobago, and that really is what plays out every vacation when people take notice of what’s going on in schools.”

Carrington, O. Gadsby-Dolly: $5 budget can’t cover all our expenses. 4th September, 2024. Guardian.

… she is framing the issue as a perennial, unsolvable problem that cannot be solved. The hope is that you will swallow that and accept that, while the occasional student will get brained by a falling concrete slab, the MoE is simply trying its level best with insufficient funds in an untenable situation that is no fault of its own.

This is insulting enough coming from a person sitting in a government as fond of telling citizens to band their bellies and suck it up as this one has been… until you stop to consider how we got into this situation in the first place.

Obviously, preventative maintenance is much cheaper than the current practice of allowing a school to deteriorate and then scrambling to do expensive emergency repairs until we can afford to spend a couple hundred million on a new school.

So why didn’t we do it?

Well, as a member of the government that has run this country for the vast majority of its 62 years of independence, I imagine Dr. Gadsby-Dolly herself would be well-placed to answer that. In fact, before she plants herself before another microphone to deliver empty excuses for a situation for which she is directly accountable, perhaps she might consider answering more pertinent questions, such as:

1. Why exactly have we allowed our school facilities to deteriorate to this point?
2. Does it make sense to blame the lockdown for the continued decline in academic performance when so many of our schools are intermittently closed due to preventable infrastructural issues?
3. Speaking of the lockdown, why aren’t we implementing the learnings from the digital school era to address the amount of learning hours lost to these infrastructural issues?
4. What is your government’s plan for rectifying this increasingly expensive situation? (Does it have one, or is the plan to keep haemorrhaging money on emergency repairs as our current schools continue to age?)
5. Does your government see any connection between the state of our schools (and the wider education system) and the crime situation allyuh always lamenting, or nah?

Mind you, I don’t expect to get answers to any of these critical questions. Recently, I’ve noticed that our politicians prefer to fade quietly into the background for a while after they give their lips a little too much liberty. Unless that is, enough of them screw up at once that the boss himself has to step in and backpedal.

She might consider it, though. After all, Silly Season is just around the corner, and it’s probably not a great idea to be handing that other pack of jokers these kinds of easy scores right about now.