Minister incompetence left Scholarship students stranded in London

National Scholarship students in London, England are now virtually stranded because of the rank incompetence and callousness of Minister of Education Anthony Garcia.

I have been informed that several students are at the mercy of their landlords and cannot afford meals and daily essentials because Mr. Garcia’s Ministry has not been remitting their stipends on a timely basis.

Even such a routine monthly exercise seems to be beyond Mr. Garcia’s competence and skill set. The situation is even more critical and urgent because London is one of the most expensive cities in the world and the forecast is for an extremely cold winter. The students are enduring untold hardship.

National Scholarship winners are the country’s finest young minds and tomorrow’s leaders in the various professions and in national service. Now even they, too, are suffering at the hands of the most inept and hopeless Minister of Education in Trinidad and Tobago’s history.

Mr. Garcia has already riddled the education sector with an endless stream of schools repair issues and he has rolled back several critical achievements. They include curtailment of the computer laptop grant, shutdown of After-School Homework Centres and cutbacks in the School Feeding programme. In addition, not a single school or Early Childhood Centre has been constructed during Mr. Garcia’s sorry tenure of under-performance and bungling.

In the interest of the entire education fraternity, Mr. Garcia must be removed from this critical portfolio. He has inflicted widespread damage at all areas of national education and is clearly on a path of destroying all the major academic and infrastructural gains of the prior electoral term.
Prime Minister Dr. Keith Rowley must show a commitment to the education sector by dismissing his pathetic and useless Minister of Education.

DR. TIM GOPEESINGH, Member of Parliament for Caroni East,
Former Minister of Education.