Half-day school and other ULP half-truths

By *Jomo Sanga Thomas

(“Plain Talk” June 20, 2025)

Our country is in dire need of a serious conversation about almost everything. Sadly, we won’t get it from our political elite. For them, politics is a full-time hustle, pregnant with grin and jive, small talk and trivia, slogans and much to do about nothing.

As the next elections draw nearer, Vincentians can expect rapid-fire exchanges from the political class that amount to mostly smoke, intense heat, but little or no light. The sound bites and sloganeering have already begun. In fact, with the advent of talk radio and social media, we are now accustomed to all talk, all the time, with no honest attempt at enlightenment.

Take the ULP’s noisy rant about half-day school during the early period of the NDP tenure in government. Because I spent all the years between 1984 and 2001 abroad, studying and working, I had long believed that the “noise” about half-day schools was meritorious in that it was universal, meaning all schools in SVG were on a half-day schedule, and that students across SVG were at a severe deficit. 

The whole truth is that some schools, not most, not all, were in poor conditions, and the decision was made to implement a shift system to allow for much-needed repairs. The first shift was from 8 to 1, and the other ran from 1 to 5 pm. On any school day, then as now, students receive 5 hours of instruction, with 3 hours between 9 a.m. to noon and the remaining 2 hours from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Unfortunately, the afternoon shift then was reduced by an hour, but this was to facilitate repairs. 

As the ULP has demonstrated with repairs at the St. Vincent Grammar, Girls’ High, and Thomas Saunders Secondary schools, better planning and resource allocation enabled the construction of the structures at the old airport in Arnos Vale to house and instruct our students properly. However, even that plan is not beyond criticism because one could legitimately ask why a government that boasts about an “education revolution” allowed three of its top secondary schools to fall into disrepair, demanding their closure.

If anything, the half-day school attendance turned out to be more demanding on school administrators and teachers than negatively impacting our children’s education.  However, the ULP propaganda machine has turned the half-day shift system into a misleading mantra. 

A deep dive into the issue taught me never to accept anything at face value. Blind faith is for infants. Adults must forever go in search of the truth. As Dr. Walter Rodney said, “A half-truth plus another half-truth equals one big lie.” 

Or take the ULP’s new jingle, “Airport, seaport, we narrh sell passports.” This “new and improved” drivel amounts to cheap and vulgar sloganeering that tells us nothing about feasibility, affordability, sustainability, transparency, efficiency, necessity and debt financing. The only explanation the government offers for the EC$700 million expenditure on the new port is that the old deep-water harbour is 60 years old and can no longer serve us effectively. But this is a big lie. A Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) study revealed that a US$20 million rehabilitation of the old port could efficiently and adequately serve us for years to come. 

There has been no discussion on what our country would be exporting over the next decade or two that demands an expanded seaport. Does our multi-billion-dollar import bill justify the construction at such a price tag? Only the gullible offer an unqualified yes to this critically important question, especially at a time when our national debt has topped $3 billion and continues to spiral uncontrollably.

As the scholarly interventions on the citizen by investment programme of Dr. Jason Haynes, Mikhail Charles and Guevara Leacock vividly demonstrated, the issue is much more nuanced and complex than a mindless rant about the virtues and merits of programmes like CBI that are intended to offer budgetary support and investment capital so needed in our resourced starved region. 

Weighing in on the CBI conversation, Allen Chastenet, St Lucia’s opposition leader, told the OECS assembly that the CBI is “a vexing issue”, noting “Our CBI programme is being challenged.” He asked, “Why can’t we have one CBI unit? Why can’t the money go to the OECS? Why can’t we use some of the CBI monies that we’re collecting to strengthen the integration of the OECS?”

Chastanet insisted that an integrated CBI programme across the OECS could be a “a win-win situation”, noting that the leaders could decide how to divide the money.

“But I can assure you that if we don’t do that, and we find ourselves wanting to complain about what people are doing to us, we’re going to lose a great resource and that would be to our detriment,” Chastanet said.

He noted that Gonsalves does not support CBI, “but I keep saying to him, St. Lucia got into the CBI programme because we realised that everybody who was becoming a citizen in the other countries was benefiting from the Basseterre Treaty.

“So over 200,000 new citizens have come in and have access to all of our markets, and the more we integrate, the more that they have access to,” Chastanet said, adding that all OECS countries are involved in CBI because of the nature of the union… we were all involved because what people are benefiting from is a common market here. Still, most of our passports have the same value in the international market.

“But I genuinely believe that we need to take our region more seriously, hold it up as a great example, and be proud of what we’ve been able to achieve so far, and press on even harder to integrate this region so that we could negotiate better terms for the businesses and the citizens of our country.”

Chastenet’s remarks further demonstrate how serious debate is to be tackled with a hope of resolution: no cheap talk or empty rhetoric, just clear and level-headed reasoning.

*Jomo Sanga Thomas is a lawyer, journalist, social commentator and a former Speaker of the House of Assembly in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

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