Dismantled Progress, Repackaged as Innovation

Dear Editor, 

When the PPP government shut down the Bertram Collins College of the Public Service in 2021, they did more than close a building, they dismantled an institution that symbolized national investment in professional excellence. Established under the APNU+AFC administration, the College was a forward-thinking initiative designed to train young Guyanese for meaningful public service careers through structured, accredited coursework delivered by qualified local educators. It was a serious step toward a competent, merit-based civil service.

Yet in a fit of political spite, the PPP terminated its staff, abandoned its campus, and reduced years of planning and curriculum development to rubble. The decision was not administrative; it was ideological, a reckless attempt to erase a predecessor’s achievement, even at the cost of national progress.

Now, in a stunning twist of hypocrisy, the same government has relaunched public service training under the banner of a Coursera partnership, dressing political vandalism in the garb of modernization. But let’s be honest, Coursera is not a national training programme. It is an open, foreign-based digital platform that offers generic online courses to anyone with a credit card and a strong Wi-Fi signal. It has no tailored curriculum for Guyana’s public service, no contextual understanding of our governance frameworks, and no faculty accountable to the public.

Replacing a physical institution, where young professionals were mentored, evaluated, and molded for national service,  with an imported online catalogue is short-sighted, lazy, and deeply unserious. You cannot build a disciplined, people-centred bureaucracy by outsourcing civic education to a website. Public administration demands mentorship, accountability, and immersion in national context — not YouTube-style lectures and auto-graded quizzes.

What the PPP calls modernization is in fact abdication of responsibility. It is the outsourcing of national development to a platform that neither knows nor cares about Guyana. The Bertram Collins College represented investment in local capacity; Coursera represents withdrawal from it.

In short, the PPP has shown that they will dismantle anything associated with the previous administration, label it as bad, tear it down, and then relaunch something essentially similar, marketed as cutting-edge modernization. The public service college? Gone. The promise of training young people for public service careers? Repackaged. The investment already made in that college? Abandoned. The sense of national purpose in building a professional public service? Certainly weaker for having taken this route.

If the PPP government truly wishes to demonstrate that it is serious about improving, modernizing, and professionalizing the public service, then it must have the courage to restore what it destroyed. Bring back a real public service college, one that develops human capacity, nurtures leadership, and builds institutions rooted in Guyanese values and expertise. Only then can we speak credibly about modernization. Until that happens, all we have is a hollow imitation of progress.

Yours truly

Randolph Critchlow