Slackness in enforcing scholarship rules

AGRICULTURE Minister Clarence Rambharat acknowledged in the Senate on Tuesday that the State had lost $13 million of an estimated $26 million owed by scholars who had taken scholarships from the country without thereafter fulfilling their mandatory period of service. 

Because the State failed to act during the period set to bring legal action, 86 cases are statute-barred and cannot be brought to account. 

Mr Rambharat was quick to note that this failure occurred largely when the opposition was in power; but that's only a distraction. The scope of the analysis runs from 2012-2019. 

It’s also not really news. Former education minister Anthony Garcia announced the issue in May. 

The simple truth is that the management of scholarships has been a shambles for decades, and all parties in power should be ashamed of the way that local talent has been encouraged, trained and then too often ultimately discarded in public service. 

It should not fall to the Auditor General to point out to the Ministry of Education its responsibility to keep accurate records and to act on delinquent scholars in a timely manner. 

These scholarships are loans given against future service. Any loan should have a guarantor to be held responsible when repayment doesn’t happen. 

It is one of the great embarrassments of the scholarship programme that the very point of it, to cultivate a new generation of scholars trained to move the nation forward, too often ends in their returning to face the politics of civil service, open contempt for new ideas and unsubtle sidelining of their capacity to serve. 

A committee was announced in March 2019 to review the national scholarship programme. Dr Lovell Francis, then minister in the Ministry of Education, called for more emphasis on technical vocational skills and for scholarships to be tied more closely to the developmental needs of the country. 

Those needs are yet to be articulated and in mid-November, Education Minister Dr Nyan Gadsby-Dolly announced deep cuts in GATE and the national scholarship programmes, dropping the total to no more than 100. 

Scholars who return to give their time of service far too often leave the public sector the instant that their required time is up. 

The public service is already challenged to match private-sector salaries for qualified professionals, so a system guarantees that the scholars it has paid to educate will leave at the first opportunity is an even more reprehensible waste of money than $13 million in lost scholarships. 

Matching scholarship winners to future roles in government service should be an automatic part of the process. Instead, even those who do honour their service return with dread, fearing wasted years working at useless tasks that ignore their hard-earned skills.