Ja­maica is by far my sec­ond favourite is­land in the Caribbean. More than two decades ago when I first vis­it­ed the coun­try there were four things that stood out for me: its nat­ur­al beau­ty, its cul­ture, how much the peo­ple re­mind­ed me of T&T na­tion­als and how much po­ten­tial the coun­try had to be a pow­er­house eco­nom­i­cal­ly; if on­ly it was pre­pared to take the right de­ci­sions.

Since then PJ Pat­ter­son won his third term in of­fice and re­tired, Ja­maica had its first fe­male Prime Min­is­ter, Bruce Gold­ing came out of the wilder­ness and be­came Prime Min­is­ter, on­ly to be felled by the Dudus Coke im­broglio, Sis­ter P came back to pow­er and now An­drew Hol­ness is in­to his sec­ond term, hav­ing won by a land­slide.

Hol­ness vic­to­ry came on the back of in­fight­ing among the com­rades in the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Par­ty but more im­por­tant­ly the labourites had ben­e­fit­ed from one of the best per­form­ing economies in the Caribbean.

Ja­maicans had fi­nal­ly stayed the course so that they may one day eat turkey in­stead of eat­ing John Crow (cor­beaux).

You see there is a Ja­maican say­ing that goes like this; “If you can’t get turkey then you have to sat­is­fy with John Crow.”

It is a sug­ges­tion that you have to set­tle for sec­ond best if you are un­able to achieve your goals or if you cant get what you want you have to set­tle for that which looks clos­est to it.

When the gov­ern­ment an­nounced that it was mak­ing fur­ther cuts to the GATE pro­gramme and was end­ing its sup­port for post-grad­u­ate stud­ies across the board, be­cause of fi­nan­cial con­straints, I was flum­moxed since this is the same ad­min­is­tra­tion that this year in­creased spend­ing on the make-work pro­gramme, CEPEP.

The Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly an­nounced that the gov­ern­ment had al­so cut by 75 per cent the num­ber of na­tion­al schol­ar­ships as it tries to save mon­ey.

You see this gov­ern­ment clear­ly does not see ed­u­ca­tion as an in­vest­ment in the fu­ture of the coun­try. For sure there was a need to re­form the GATE pro­gramme, to en­sure it aligned with the na­tion’s needs,to sup­port STEM and Da­ta Sci­ence and lim­it the pre­pon­der­ance of hu­man­i­ties. No­tice I said lim­it and not elim­i­nate.

If the gov­ern­ment saw ed­u­ca­tion as an in­vest­ment then it would see as a pri­or­i­ty the build­ing of a knowl­edge-based so­ci­ety and the de­vel­op­ment of the coun­try’s hu­man cap­i­tal.

Al­ready we have seen that en­rol­ment in ter­tiary in­sti­tu­tions is down aris­ing from the last change to GATE. This is not some fig­ment of the imag­i­na­tion of those who don’t sup­port the gov­ern­ment’s nar­ra­tive, that peo­ple are gam­ing the sys­tem or can af­ford to pay to go to school or are us­ing it to get de­grees for get­ting a de­gree sake. Yes some of that ex­ist but the UWI has seen an al­most 25 per cent fall in en­rol­ment. That means few­er peo­ple will be able to crit­i­cal­ly con­tribute to T&T’s de­vel­op­ment at a time when a knowl­edge-based so­ci­ety is so im­por­tant.

What could be gov­ern­ment’s strate­gic ob­jec­tive to re­duce the num­ber of peo­ple en­rolling and at­tain­ing ter­tiary and post grad­u­ate de­grees? What could be the ben­e­fit of the mea­sure to save $100mil­lion an­nu­al­ly in a $50 bil­lion bud­get? A sav­ing of 0.05 per­cent of the na­tion­al bud­get? Is it that we must be pre­pared as a coun­try to set­tle in­to the fu­ture to eat John Crow?

I know there are sup­port­ers of the gov­ern­ment who would al­so say that there were many who did post-grad­u­ate work with­out gov­ern­ment sup­port, that there are schol­ar­ships etc, that there is a need to break the de­pen­den­cy syn­drome that ex­ist even in GATE be­cause hav­ing got­ten an un­der­grad de­gree you should work and pay your way.

To those I say per­haps you should con­sid­er the av­er­age earn­ings for peo­ple en­ter­ing the work­force with a first de­gree and the cost of those post grad­u­ate pro­gramme and tie that back to the cost of liv­ing and work out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of young pro­fes­sion­als pay­ing for post grad­u­ate de­grees.

I al­so in­vite them to con­sid­er what it will take to do a full-time PHD pro­gramme as op­posed to part time and the dif­fer­ence in the time­frame.

I al­so say to those who sup­port this mea­sure that when the Agri­cul­ture Min­is­ter Clarence Ramb­harath and I were grow­ing up in Enid Vil­lage, Rio Claro, for a time we did not have paved roads, but we still went to school and stud­ied, the roads were even­tu­al­ly paved and no one wants to re­turn to those days. Some things rep­re­sent progress, plain and sim­ple.

Eco­nom­ics are about choic­es, all gov­ern­ments have choic­es, but when your gov­ern­ment choos­es make-work pro­grammes over ed­u­ca­tion, as the Prime Min­is­ter is fond of say­ing, them is peo­ple to watch.

This is the clas­sic case of pen­ny smart and pound fool­ish. But we ought not be sur­prised be­cause we have seen this play out in the last Row­ley ad­min­is­tra­tion when a de­ci­sion was tak­en to ground the Air Guard he­li­copter fleet be­cause it was too ex­pen­sive to main­tain, in the process the gov­ern­ment dec­i­mat­ed the Air Guard as the pi­lots left to main­tain their li­cense re­quire­ment and the al­ready porous bor­ders, re­mained even more open. They then com­plained that il­le­gal im­mi­gra­tion was re­spon­si­ble for the sec­ond COVID-19 spike and the lock down that has all but crip­pled busi­ness­es was again brought in­to ef­fect. We now see in the bud­get plans to buy an­oth­er he­li­copter for the Air Guard to pa­trol the en­tire coun­try, again the gov­ern­ment wants us to set­tle for John Crow.

We must have a strat­e­gy for the coun­try, for our strate­gic ob­jec­tives and in case the ad­min­is­tra­tion and im­por­tant­ly the rest of the coun­try are not see­ing it, there is struc­tur­al change hap­pen­ing to the glob­al econ­o­my that has on­ly been has­tened by the COVID-19 cri­sis.

On Mon­day, the coun­try’s largest nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­er BPTT start­ed send­ing home em­ploy­ees. The com­pa­ny will cut 25 per­cent of its lo­cal work­force. That is 100 well pay­ing jobs gone.

The re­trench­ment at BPTT may have meant lit­tle if it was sim­ply a case of the com­pa­ny re­act­ing to cycli­cal­ly low prices. This is not the case. It is a re­sponse to a struc­tur­al change at the com­pa­ny which has placed its bets that the fu­ture is in re­new­ables and that nat­ur­al gas is but a bridge in­to the fu­ture and not the fu­ture. In oth­er words BPTT that pro­duces half of the coun­try’s nat­ur­al gas is say­ing that the fu­ture is not in nat­ur­al gas.

Imag­ine the state of this econ­o­my if oil and nat­ur­al gas are not com­modi­ties of re­al val­ue. BPTT is ex­pect­ing this to be a re­al­i­ty in the next 30 years. For those like Dr Row­ley who have few­er years ahead of them than be­hind them, thir­ty years may seem a long way off, but for those who are en­ter­ing Uni­ver­si­ty, or those who are hop­ing to do post- grad­u­ate stud­ies now and have had the rug pulled from un­der them, they will still be here in a world that may not see the val­ue of oil and gas any­more. In oth­er words there is un­like­ly to be any turkey for them to eat, on­ly John Crow.

I have spend con­sid­er­able time over the last six months and col­umn space urg­ing gov­ern­ment and the coun­try as a whole to see that these are dan­ger­ous times for T&T, to recog­nise that we have al­ready lost more than a decade, per­haps two decades and we have to de­cide now what the fu­ture will look like if we do noth­ing and what we want the fu­ture to look like, and it is that gap which has to be closed by req­ui­site pol­i­cy. It al­so re­quires con­stant mon­i­tor­ing and feed­back.

We have seen Pro­man an­nounc­ing that it is con­struct­ing the largest green methanol plant in the world in Eu­rope. Pro­man which has so much in­vest­ed in this coun­try and yet the Na­tion­al En­er­gy, which is re­spon­si­ble for at­tract­ing heavy in­dus­tri­al projects and has an en­tire de­part­ment ded­i­cat­ed to it, could not bring such a project home.

Be­fore cut­ting GATE the gov­ern­ment should tell us what has been the cost of loss mak­ing TTT to the trea­sury, what is the cost of the myr­i­ad of state en­ter­pris­es that it con­tin­ues to sup­port, that are not crit­i­cal to the de­vel­op­ment of the coun­try.

I won­der what would the fa­ther of the na­tion Dr Er­ic Williams think of this PNM gov­ern­ment which sees cut­ting ed­u­ca­tion as a pri­or­i­ty over make work pro­grammes.

Sure­ly the pop­u­la­tion and fu­ture gen­er­a­tions de­serve bet­ter than John Crow.