“Where has the mon­ey gone?”

This ques­tion was asked by Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor David Nakhid re­gard­ing the $2.3 bil­lion al­lo­cat­ed and spent by the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment Gov­ern­ment on projects to re­pair or con­struct pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary schools for the pe­ri­od 2016 to 2023.

The av­er­age spent on schools an­nu­al­ly was $287.5 mil­lion.

Nakhid raised the is­sue dur­ing a UNC press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day.

He said, that while the Unit­ed Na­tions has been dri­ving home the im­por­tance of ed­u­ca­tion, the Gov­ern­ment has “done the worst pos­si­ble job” when it comes to the fu­ture of our chil­dren by re­duc­ing GATE funds, re­mov­ing ed­u­ca­tion­al pro­grammes and crash­ing the lap­top pro­gramme.

In Feb­ru­ary, Nakhid said he vis­it­ed some schools that were in dis­re­pair and saw school projects that were left aban­doned.

Two of the sec­ondary schools he paid at­ten­tion to were Mt Hope and St Joseph.

He said Mt Hope has been falling apart while St Joseph Sec­ondary, which cost tax­pay­ers mil­lions of dol­lars, was aban­doned in 2015 and stripped of its roof, win­dows and door by “pipers and thieves.”

These two schools, he said, were eye­sores.

St Joseph is now a haven for crim­i­nals and drug ad­dicts.

Nakhid said while the Gov­ern­ment spent $2.3 bil­lion on schools, Mt Hope and St Joseph were ear­marked for re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion works but from their ap­pear­ance, were ne­glect­ed.

These two ar­eas, he said, were in ur­gent need of schools to mit­i­gate against crime and crim­i­nal­i­ty.

Nakhid pulled the $2.3 bil­lion fig­ure from an ar­ti­cle in yes­ter­day’s Sun­day Guardian.

The ar­ti­cle showed that Mt Hope was ex­pect­ed to cost $174.7 mil­lion while in 2021 the Min­istry of Fi­nance en­tered in­to a con­tract with MTS for the pro­vi­sion of project man­age­ment ser­vices for the com­ple­tion of con­struc­tion and out­fit­ting of St Joseph Sec­ondary.

In­clud­ed in that list­ing for re­pairs, Nakhid said was Pic­cadil­ly Gov­ern­ment Pri­ma­ry School which was closed four years ago, but he said this was nev­er done.

“But mon­ey has been al­lo­cat­ed there. So where the mon­ey gone? So we have a gov­ern­ment here, ob­vi­ous­ly, quite com­fort­able in not on­ly mis­al­lo­cat­ing, mis­man­ag­ing and en­gag­ing in blan­ket cor­rup­tion when it comes to ed­u­ca­tion,” he al­leged.

Nakhid said that while the PNM gov­ern­ment has been telling the coun­try that they are strapped for funds, “We are see­ing a big pro­nounce­ment of $2.3 bil­lion in school up­grades in eight years.”