Trinidad & Tobago: Opponent MP scolds Education Minister!

Trinidad & Tobago: Davendranath Tancoo, MP for Oropouche West, has scolded the Minister of Education for ‘the hopelessly poor job’ she has done in her portfolio.

Davendranath Tancoo delivered at a delivery ceremony for laptops procured by the Penal/Debe Regional Corporation (PDRC) on Friday.

The MP, in petitioning attendees, said he did not believe that 65,000 students were without devices for home-based learning. Instead, he thinks it’s much more.

Tancoo added “Access to a parent’s cell phone cannot constitute adequate access to the internet and a device for a child’s education, especially as many of these parents have to hustle an income outside the home during the day.”

“It is a shame that after nine months, they are still confessing that 30,000 children still have no device or internet access. Worse, it is a fact that the worse affected communities are those rural areas where poverty is rampant and who need the assistance most,” added MP.

Imagine the Minister of Finance allocated 50 million dollars to buy laptops in the annual budget. After four months, the Minister of Education tells this population that the government procurement process had BEGUN through IGOVTT.

After nine months of tens of thousands of children being evacuated without access to IT and completely deprived of whatever schooling was available via the internet, the Government boasts of having STARTED the procurement process!

What have they been doing for the last nine months? They know what the problem is, they know what the solution is, they have the money to fix the problem, but they CHOOSE to sit on their hands and throw away our children’s future. That is a shame!”

Moreover, the MP supported the call by PDRC Chairman Dr. Allen Sammy to restart the laptop program. This, as he urged the Government to stop “discriminating” against rural communities.

“These are poor families in difficult circumstances, whose children are being penalized while the government Ministers and their friends and families feed at the trough,” he added.

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