By Bruce Golding, ContributorON TUESDAY, October 14, 2003, the House of Representatives passed a landmark resolution which committed the Government to increasing the budgetary allocation to the Ministry of Education to 15 per cent over the next 5 years in increments of 1 per cent per annum.
The resolution which was moved by the Leader of the Opposition had originally called for the immediate abolition of the cost-sharing programme but was amended at the instance of the Government to reflect that commitment to increasing the allocation to the Ministry of Education.
The Government has failed to honour this commitment in its first year of implementation. In fact, this year's allocation to the Ministry of Education has been reduced from 10 per cent to less than 9 per cent. Were I Dr. Davies, I would have come straight up, apologised for not having fulfilled the commitment and explained that the precarious fiscal situation and the imperative of achieving the stated fiscal target rendered it impossible to honour the commitment. I would still be hammered but I would have come clean.
What Dr. Davies proffered was disingenuous to the point of absurdity. He said, firstly, that the historic agreement reached in Parliament in October "was deficient in terms of not being specific enough".
BLATANTLY UNTRUE
Bear in mind that he, himself, participated in the debate on the resolution and did not at that time find it lacking in specificity. But the fact is that his assertion is blatantly untrue! Not only did the resolution, as approved, specify the annual increments by which the allocation was to be increased to 15 per cent but it went further to set out a nine-point action plan to which the additional expenditure was to be dedicated.
Dr. Davies went on to argue that $5.7 billion in debt service payments related to loans which were used for educational
projects and should therefore be included in the total expenditure on education. This, he said, would bring the total to $35.9 billion which amounts to 11 per cent of the budget. In other words, the Government has kept its commitment for the first year. Never mind that last year's allocation of 10 per cent against which it must be measured does not take into account education-related debt service payments.
But here Dr. Davies tripped up again. The prayer of the resolution was unambiguous:
"Be it resolved that the government commits itself to INCREASE THE ALLOCATION TO THE MINISTRY OF EDUCATION to 15 per cent of the total budget over the next five years in increments of 1 per cent per annum".
This could not possibly have meant the inclusion of debt service payments since those form no part of the "allocation to the Ministry of Education".
If we were to take Dr. Davies' reasoning to its finality, every dollar of debt service payments could be relocated to the Ministry that had utilised the relevant loan. We would then end up with a budget in which the allocation to debt service would be zero. How wonderful! Not even his own Memorandum on the Budget tabled on April 15, 2004, indulges in such absurdity. It used a pie chart to identify the allocation to debt service as 69 per cent and that to "Education, Youth and Culture" as 9 per cent. I invite Dr. Davies to complete the exercise. It would at least answer a question that I recently posed: Where has all the borrowed money gone?
Bruce Golding is a Senator and Chairman of the Opposition Jamaica Labour Party (JLP).
