A most questionable World Bank report got my goose

October 26, 2013, By KNews, Filed Under Features / Columnists, My Column, Source

Last week I examined the decline in the use of English and while I might have been distracted, I still feel strongly about the apparent decline in the language. Surprisingly, there are people who feel that I am ignoring what happened in the past. One of those is my friend Harry Gill, a remigrant.

This week the Education Ministry summoned a press conference to announce that Guyana had copped five of the eight awards given by the Caribbean Examinations Council.

At that forum I took the opportunity to confront Harry Gill about a letter he had written to me and which he had published in the Chronicle.
But before I take Harry to task, I must examine the statistics that are being presented to me.

Minister Priya Manickchand, for example, says that her government has spent extensively on education and today the nation is reaping the rewards. She informed me and the other reporters that prior to the advent of her government, only eight per cent of the people who wrote the external examinations passed English. The pass rate for Mathematics was also equally ridiculous.

Many of us find that impossible to believe. Even Minister Manickchand was aware that passing English and Mathematics was a given; it was expected and our friends all passed—at least most of them. For the percentage to be so low, it must be that a larger number of us were writing the examinations.

Yet there is a contradiction. Minister Manickchand said that no more than thirty per cent of the teachers who operated in the classroom were trained. She said that there were also fewer schools.

If that was the case, then few of us were writing the examinations. Assuming that we kept failing so miserably, I am left to wonder how it is that so many of my schoolmates who migrated copped top jobs in their adopted country.

But this is not about a debate, it is about what Harry Gill presented to me as a World Bank report. If indeed it is a World Bank report then there are two things, the World Bank was slipshod and less than professional or it was so biased against the former administration that it was prepared to release distorted information.

When I described the education system as calamitous, I never realized that I was touching a nerve. One day Harry Gill came to me and informed me that I had paved the way for him to release information that he had suppressed.

He declined to say what information until I received a letter from him. I read the letter and informed him that the letter was full of misinformation.
Like so many of us, whatever is written about us by people outside the country is gospel. Mr. Gill in a most haughty retort asked me if I was questioning the World Bank report. This report spoke of things being so bad in Guyana financially that the government actually slashed the salaries of headmasters.

As long as I have been living in this country – and that means all my life – this has never happened. No one who worked with the government could ever say that they took home less money by way of salary than they had been earning from the same employer.

But there is this so-called World Bank report talking about a headmaster earning something like $773 a month in 1990.  This is so blatantly untrue that anyone who was working at that time would recognize the falsehood.  A low level public servant in 1990 would have been earning at least $9,000 per month. But according to Harry Gill, this fact was contained in a World Bank report.

The very report goes on to state that in 1992 a head teacher was earning $1,708 per month. In 1992 Roger Luncheon would tell you that he was earning $60,000 per month. He was not in Government and he could not claim to be among the elites of the day.

If indeed the information was garnered from the World Bank report, then whoever prepared the report certainly mixed up the figures, because the headmaster would have been earning no less than $25,000 per month. There are many of those headmasters around who must know what they earned.

Sadly, Harry modified his letter to the Chronicle because he actually wrote that the salary plummeted to $773 a month, some time after it was at one time some $1700 a month.

There I was, asking him if at any time in the history of the country he could recall anyone having his salary slashed. That is a difficult question to answer, so all he would say was if I was questioning the World Bank report.

I do use the language of the common, uneducated person. It is a very colourful language and aptly descriptive as well. I used some of that to inform Harry about my thoughts about his World Bank report.

I have since asked the Ministry of Education to provide for me the salary scales that prevailed in the years preceding the 1992 elections. I have been promised the figures and I am a very optimistic person.

I do know that the Americans played a very important role in reinstalling the PPP to power. I am not willing to concede that the role involved fabricating reports. One thing is clear; I must now look at the reports issued by international organisations.