The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

The Bahamian education system’s woes have created sub-standard management throughout the Government and private sector, resulting in “the blind leading the blind”.

Robert Myers, a former Bahamas Chamber of Commerce and Employers Confederation (BCCEC) chairman, told Tribune Business that many businesses and public sector agencies were forced to persist with below par management “as it’s all we’ve got”.

He linked this both to the education system’s relatively poor output, and issues with corruption, waste and inefficiency in many government departments that have been highlighted in recent Auditor-General reports.

While acknowledging that the $20 million Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) project to enhance Bahamian workforce skills and job matching “may be along the right lines”, Mr Myers said more was required to address labour productivity.

“You can’t just throw money at it,” he told Tribune Business. “Education is something deep-rooted, and unemployment is specific to it.

“You’ve got to have a certain skill set in order to attain employment, and there are concerns with the connection of baseline skill sets to our unemployment problem.

“Do they [the unemployed] have the cognitive ability to learn the types of things required of them in the modern workforce?,” Mr Myers asked.

“With GPAs (grade point averages) being what they are, I’m not sure that’s the case - that they have the cognitive ability to be gainfully employed in the modern workforce.”

Mr Myers is one of the principals behind the newly-formed Organisation for Responsible Governance (ORG), a non-profit group aiming to boost transparency and accountability in Bahamian governance and society.

Education is one of ORG’s key issues, and Mr Myers said the private sector continuously suffered the consequences of school leavers ill-prepared for workplace demands.

“Speaking from our own experience in business, we’re challenged daily by that mediocrity,” he explained. “It’s not that they’re bad people; they’re great employees, but they don’t have the baseline skills coming out of school to advance them in the modern workforce.”

Mr Myers said this also impacted Bahamian governance, and the quality of government decision-making, services and their delivery.

“There’s a capacity issue in Bahamian governance and management,” he told Tribune Business. “In many respects, you have the blind leading the blind.

“Because there have been systematic problems in education for so many years, we have sub-standard management on so many levels.

“We can see that appearing with the corruption and mismanagement in government departments that you are all writing about now.

“If you lower the standards of education overall, in any modern society all these things are going to be affected.”

A key component of this initiative is the design of an apprenticeship programme that will benefit between 1,500 to 3,000 young Bahamians.

It will be targeted at the unemployed and school leavers, and is focused on the 16-29 year-old age group in bid to cut a 30 per cent jobless rate among young Bahamians.

The programme will provide 80 per cent “on-the-job” training, with just 20 per cent of the time spent in the classroom. And it will be linked to a pre-apprenticeship initiative under the Government’s National Training Agency (NTA), which will focus on improving ‘soft skills’, especially numeracy and literacy.

A key component of the $20 million, IDB-financed initiative is the design of an apprenticeship programme that will benefit between 1,500 to 3,000 young Bahamians.

It will be targeted at the unemployed and school leavers, and is focused on the 16-29 year-old age group in bid to cut a 30 per cent jobless rate among young Bahamians.

The programme will provide 80 per cent “on-the-job” training, with just 20 per cent of the time spent in the classroom. And it will be linked to a pre-apprenticeship initiative under the Government’s National Training Agency (NTA), which will focus on improving ‘soft skills’, especially numeracy and literacy.

Mr Myers, though, said that while the Bahamas could “mimick other jurisdictions”, the apprenticeship initiative would do little - at least in the short-term - to improve private and public sector management.

“The same issue exists; filling with sub-standard management, as that’s all we’ve got,” he added.

Businesses have complained to Tribune Business in the past about what they perceive as a “dearth of middle management talent” in the Bahamas, and the negative impact this has on operational efficiency.

All companies rely heavily on middle management for their smooth functioning, and ability to execute on corporate strategy, and its absence - at least in sufficient quantities - both holds back private sector expansion and forces companies to hire more expatriate labour than designed.

Similar issues exist in the public sector. A former Cabinet minister previously told Tribune Business that a lack of public sector management talent inevitably forced ministers to become involved in the day-to-day running of their ministries, rather than remaining above this at the policy level.

Mr Myers told Tribune Business this meant the Bahamas enjoyed “poor to mediocre results at best”, due to ministries and companies being “poorly managed down the line”.

“It’s the same across the board,” he said. “We’re seeing that in leadership, we’re seeing it in business, we’re seeing it in governance.

“If we have mediocre management in these departments and agencies, the Government can talk about efficiency all they want, but it’s not going to happen if we don’t have the right people on the bus.

“If the boss starts tiefin’, everyone else below him starts tiefin’, and then you’ve got a problem. What we say is: ‘Monkey see, money do. If the top is tiefin’, the bottom will, too’.”

The Auditor-General has recently exposed corruption, fraud, waste and inefficiency at key government departments such as Road Traffic and Social Services, with Mr Myers and ORG believing that these problems stem at least partly from poor management and educational achievement.

In a recent position paper on education, ORG warned that the Bahamas risks becoming “a failed state in less than 10 years” because around 70 per cent of its population “will be challenged” to obtain well-paying jobs due to educational under-achievement.

ORG warned that this “educational imbalance” had created an unhealthy ‘wealth gap’ in Bahamian society, with a largely “semi-literate and semi-numerate” workforce lacking upward mobility.

This, in turn, was undermining productivity and restricting gross domestic product (economic) growth.

Based on 2012 BGCSE data, the ORG said that just 1,281 out of 7,117 students tested, achieved ‘A’ or ‘B’ grades.

This, it warned, translated into just 18 per cent of high school leavers being suitably qualified for higher education.

And, with the ‘brain drain’ stemming from a lack of economic opportunity at home, the ORG position paper added that this further undermined the prospects for “sustaining strong economic growth”.