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And perhaps one of the more unpleasant decisions Finance Minister Chris Sinckler had to announce was that effective from the 2014 academic year of the University of the West Indies, Barbadian students attending any of the three campuses of the regional institution would have pay a 20 per cent tuition fee, while the government continues to bear the total economic cost for their education.
That was pounced upon as virtual political heresy by the leader of the opposition Barbados Labour Party (BLP), Mia Mottley, when she spearheaded the response the following day (Wednesday) to the Finance Minister’s budget presentation.
Declaring that Prime Minister Freundel Stuart’s administration has no mandate from the electorate for this very significant change in policy, she challenged the Democratic Labour Party-led government to call a snap general election and pledged that with an expected change in government, there would be an immediate reversal of the decision for students to meet the tuition fee.
At last February’s elections, the DLP retained power for a second five-year term, but with merely a two-seat majority in the 30-member House of Assembly.
Since then, the BLP’s former leader and three-term Prime Minister quit the leadership, and Mottley, a lawyer by profession who had served with various portfolios, including as Minister of Education and Attorney General, has been elected as the party’s new leader.
At the time of writing, a confrontation was reportedly looming between the government and the UWI’s Cave Hill Campus over the decision that, for the first time in its history, Barbadian students would be required to pay the annual tuition cost of their education, starting from the 2014 academic year.
Barrow’s legacy
The decision, for which Prime Minister Stuart’s administration had to bite the bullet at this time of deep, spreading economic gloom, may perhaps cause a stirring in the grave of the nation’s ‘Father of Independence’, Errol Walton Barrow, with whose political history free education for Barbadians, right up to UWI level, has been a cornerstone of policies by successive DLP as well as BLP-led governments.
While students at Mona, the oldest of the UWI’s three campuses, have been paying tuition fees since around the early 1990s, as I understand it, Barbadian students will now be required to do so. Painful? Yes.
However, heavy burden as it could well prove — as it had first experienced for Jamaican UWI students — particularly for those from working-class and even middle-income families, the reality check is that since back in the late 1980s, the university’s policymakers, among them participating governments, had settled in principle to bear 80 per cent of annual economic costs, with students contributing to the remaining 20 per cent.
The Barbados government intends, as I understand it, to remain committed to meeting the annual economic cost for students on all three campuses, though no longer for the 20 per cent annual tuition fee.
Vice-Chancellor Harris
What has emerged as “quite surprising” for the UWI’s administrators, according to a telephone conversation this columnist had with Vice-Chancellor Sir Nigel Harris, is the manner of the official announcement and rationale, as articulated by Finance Minister Sinckler, that’s somewhat inconsistent with structured consultations that have been occurring between high-level government and UWI representatives.
Without wishing to go into details, Sir Nigel gave assurance of the university’s “commitment” to re-engage the Barbados Government in dialogue at the “earliest opportunity”, hinting that this could in another week’s time when he is due to be in Barbados.
For his part, Finance Minister Sinckler contended in his presentation of the 2013 budget on Tuesday that “something had to give” on the government’s involvement with the UWI, which it owes approximately $200 million.
Strange argument
It was in the context of climbing indebtedness of $42 million annually, that the tough decision was made by government to introduce payment of full tuition fees for students, effective from 2014.
Why the government has consistently defaulted on its annual debt payments to accumulate a near $200 million obligation to the UWI is, of course, different argument.
There also remains for consideration the curious logic defensively introduced by the Finance Minister about “Barbados comes first”.
Was he unintentionally separating more than 7,000 students (more likely 7,500) at the Cave Hill campus, at least 80 per cent of whom are Barbadians from Barbados’ national interest?
Early Friday morning at 1:10am, the parliament approved the Budget by a single majority vote — 15 for the government; 14 for the opposition.
A mass protest rally of UWI students and their parents is scheduled for 7 o’clock tonight at Independence Square, in the city of Bridgetown.
