Editorial
Newsday
FROM ITS inception, the UWI South Campus in Debe has been plagued with commess. Construction started in 2012. It was supposed to be completed in 2014, but progress lagged.
At a grand lease handover ceremony in 2015, Prof Sir Hilary Beckles, the Vice-Chancellor, hailed the 24,050-square-metre project, on a gently rolling greenfield site once covered by sugarcane, as the largest university investment by a government in half-a-century.
Prof Clement Sankat, the St Augustine campus principal at the time, said the handover of the project – at that stage still only 75 per cent complete – was a historic one that would serve residents of south Trinidad.
But the exact use to which the campus was meant to be put was always somewhat hazy. In what UWI called a “first phase of operations” it was earmarked to house the faculty of law.
This week, on May 19, the country heard from the new campus administration under Prof Rose-Marie Belle Antoine that it will house “the newly launched Global School of Medicine” as well as “other traditional programmes.”
Under the PNM, which came to power in late 2015, there were “concerns” about the use to which the $600 million Chinese-built facility would be put. Law students protested relocation in 2017.
Critics of the 2010-2015 UNC-led PP government felt the cart had been put before the horse: a campus was built to jump-start local development instead of the other way around. Nonetheless, during the covid pandemic, it became useful, as part of the parallel health system.
The contrast between UWI’s upbeat assessment this week that the premises can be opened in August with the dour picture painted by Oropouche East MP Dr Roodal Moonilal, who has long maintained that the decade-long PNM administration kept the campus closed for politics, has only added to the muddle – long a feature of this project.
A picture paints a thousand words.
Dr Moonilal, who took to social media to share select, dispiriting shots of rusting structures and decayed signage, understands the immediate power of optics. Who needs media tours when you can go “live” online? This is good gallery, but it is not really full transparency.
The deeper problem behind the Debe campus is the politicisation of the university landscape, whether we speak of UWI or UTT.
The PNM should answer for why this project was seemingly allowed to fall into costly disrepair.
Equally, the UNC should sharpen, clarify and repurpose the developmental vision this campus might yet serve. At the very least, it must state whether it will proceed with a bond relating to the facility or bolster depleted levels of state subventions. It cannot turn back time, but it can bring this querulous tutorial to an end.
