Commentary
Paolo Kernahan
PAOLO KERNAHAN
IN THE most basic sense, CEPEP was a well-intentioned initiative intended as a remedy to a problem created by our deeply flawed, yet invariably vaunted, “free” education. The social scheme doesn’t tackle the problem for which it was created, but it has evolved into a type of Mobius loop, feeding the very societal shortcoming it was meant to solve.
When the termination of 300 contracts was announced, wiping out the income of more than 10,000 dependants, there were cries of victimisation. The government, which, during the election campaign, masqueraded as a champion of the worker, had done an about-face.
This administration says the PNM was using CEPEP as a slush fund to nourish party supporters and senior party jefes. There has been no audit of the organisation’s finances since 2020. Public Utilities Minister Barry Padarath says the goal is to cut wastage and create a culture of fairness and probity in the slush fund – sorry, programme.
So the principal complaint is that the organisation which ingests vast sums of taxpayers’ dollars is politically tainted and prone to corruption. CEPEP is a creature of politics – it is performing exactly as it’s supposed to. Excising the prevailing culture is going to take a lot more than the brute-force approach being favoured at the moment. That’s not to say that this financial black hole should have been left to its own devices; that would be a gross dereliction of duty.
Many of the voices in news soundbites complained bitterly that, “We just like everybody else, we have bills to pay, mortgage to pay and so on.” For context, the average CEPEP worker makes roughly $120 a day. That works out to about $2,400 per month. So it’s unlikely that the regular worker is paying any mortgage.
Contractors, on the other hand, “earn” a management fee between 20K and 36K, depending on the number of teams in their charge. Indeed, there are accounts of contractors controlling vast swathes of regions outside of their own and earning upwards of $50,000 monthly.
CEPEP was supposed to be an evolved version of predecessors like URP, DEWD and LIDP. All of those acronyms became dens of political knaves, criminals and skulduggery to siphon off “free” money. But as Ultron famously said, “You want to protect the world, but you don’t want it to change. How is humanity saved if it isn’t allowed to evolve?” How could CEPEP be anything other than what came before it, except on a grander scale?
Several years ago, I did a video-driven communications campaign for the organisation. The goal was to dismantle negative public perceptions about the programme and shift attitudes among the CEPEP workforce. At the time, the goal was to graduate participants out of the system. The make-work scheme tried to reinvent itself as a leg up in life rather than a life itself; the hope was that participants could be weaned off a reliance on “government formula.”
Management at the time had this idea that workers and contractors would be cycled out of the beast every three years, making way for new entrants who could use the programme to springboard to other jobs or even businesses. The very ecosystem meant to achieve this objective is designed to produce the opposite effect.
At one time, the business community, desperately in need of workers, put on a career fair to lure CEPEP workers to the private sector. The attendance was abysmal. Workers, it seems, reasoned that there was more to be gained by sticking with a paltry wage that demands very little of their time and effort.
Naturally, the contractors aren’t going anywhere as they see no reason to relinquish favourable incomes from what they consider a legitimate business. Consequently, recidivism at CEPEP remains high, along with the burden on state coffers.
This make-work programme should be make-self-sufficient, teaching workers trades that will always be in demand – plumbing, masonry, draughtsmanship, tiling, etc. These are the skills that would allow citizens who fall through the chasms in the public education system to make a way for themselves.
The opposition bleating about wickedness against workers is the most basic form of political one-upmanship there is. But the government’s thinking that an audit and “equity” in the system will change the fundamental nature of CEPEP is fatally flawed. Consequently, the programme will continue to suckle the casualties of our failed education system. Their children will, in turn, likely enter the programme themselves in an infinite loop of politically mandated desolation.
