De­spite his grow­ing in­ter­est in con­tribut­ing to his home­land, for­mer Howard Uni­ver­si­ty pres­i­dent and phil­an­thropist Dr Wayne Fred­er­ick said yes­ter­day that he is sim­ply too hon­est to en­gage in pol­i­tics.

Fred­er­ick, who was award­ed Trinidad and To­ba­go’s high­est ho­n­our, the Or­der of the Re­pub­lic, in 2020, made the com­ment as he ad­dressed ques­tions about po­ten­tial po­lit­i­cal am­bi­tions lo­cal­ly and abroad while at the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion, where he and his wife, Si­mone, do­nat­ed $1 mil­lion in their chil­dren’s names to help ad­dress de­fi­cien­cies in the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem.

He has al­so been trav­el­ling to T&T fre­quent­ly since re­tir­ing from Howard Uni­ver­si­ty, hav­ing pledged to vis­it one school each month to in­spire young peo­ple to pur­sue their dreams de­spite the chal­lenges they may face.

Fred­er­ick ex­pressed his de­sire to im­prove the coun­try.

“I think peo­ple are al­ways go­ing to in­fer things from your in­ter­est... My goal is just to make this place a bet­ter place. What­ev­er mech­a­nism is best to do that, that’s my goal. Right now, it does not in­volve pol­i­tics. It in­volves not just my phil­an­thropy in terms of my re­sources but it in­volves the most im­por­tant re­source, which is my time. I won’t make a good politi­cian be­cause I’ll prob­a­bly... I’m prob­a­bly go­ing to be too hon­est with my an­swers and that’s not go­ing to be a very pop­u­lar thing,” he said.

As a sick­le cell war­rior, Fred­er­ick praised the pub­lic ed­u­ca­tion and health­care sys­tems in T&T, de­scrib­ing the do­na­tion as mere­ly a down­pay­ment on his grat­i­tude.

“I will nev­er be able to re­pay this coun­try and its pub­lic health­care sys­tem or ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem for the op­por­tu­ni­ties I’ve had,” Fred­er­ick said.

“That pub­lic health­care sys­tem took care of me. I still have not met an­oth­er board-cer­ti­fied sur­geon who has sick­le cell any­where in the world. Not to say that I’m the on­ly per­son, but again it says about the type of prepa­ra­tion that I had.”

Re­call­ing his ed­u­ca­tion­al jour­ney, Fred­er­ick high­light­ed his ex­pe­ri­ence at Diego Mar­tin Gov­ern­ment Pri­ma­ry School, where he re­ceived an “ex­cel­lent” ed­u­ca­tion, fol­lowed by an “in­cred­i­ble” ex­pe­ri­ence at St Mary’s Col­lege that pre­pared him to com­pete glob­al­ly. He skipped Form Three and com­plet­ed his O-Lev­els at age 14, and A-Lev­els at 16. At Howard Uni­ver­si­ty, he par­tic­i­pat­ed in an ac­cel­er­at­ed pro­gramme, earn­ing both un­der­grad­u­ate and med­ical de­grees by age 22.

“None of that makes me ex­cep­tion­al. What is ex­cep­tion­al is the fact that I was pre­pared by a coun­try with a pub­lic sys­tem that al­lowed me to over­come chal­lenges and ob­sta­cles that I oth­er­wise would not have had,” he said.

His do­na­tion was the min­istry’s first cash con­tri­bu­tion to its Adopt-a-School ini­tia­tive, launched in 2020.

Fred­er­ick was set to de­liv­er the keynote ad­dress at the Stock Ex­change last evening, where he planned to urge cor­po­rate T&T to match his mil­lion-dol­lar gift. He in­di­cat­ed that this would not be the end of their col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion, as he and his wife are al­so look­ing to ad­dress con­cerns at the School for the Blind.

In re­sponse, Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly praised Fred­er­ick for his gen­er­ous con­tri­bu­tion. She ex­plained that the $1 mil­lion will be al­lo­cat­ed for in­fra­struc­tur­al im­prove­ments and that the donor will choose from a list of schools in need.