By Dennis Adonis From Caribbean News Now

The Guyana government has recently signed a memorandum of understanding with the government of India for the establishment of a US$1 million ICT Center of Excellence inside two classroom spaces at the NDMA – University of Guyana campus in Georgetown.

While the announcement may have sounded pleasant in the annals of diplomatic propaganda, any expert in ICT or ICT journalism would tell you that the government of this tiny South American country erred from the moment they agreed to something with India that should have actually cost nothing.

To a layman, my argument may seem to make very little sense. But in order for one to better understand my point, one would first have to gain some insight into other freely available technology projects that are tenfold better than the standard out-of-sync ICT training that generally comes out of similar projects from India.

What India is claiming to fund is actually something that is already offered freely and of a better quality elsewhere.

I can list more than 50 globally recognized companies and universities that would have given the Guyana government something better than this supposedly US$1 million Indian ICT Project for free. But let’s start with a regular brand such as HP, for example.

By all accounts Hewlett Packard, better known by its HP acronym, is one of the most influential and recognized brands in the world of information technology.

The brand is so well received that people buy more than 50 million units of its branded computers each year, at an average of around two computers per second.

Governments and companies around the world rely heavily on the HP brand inasmuch that even the US government has secured training arrangements with HP (among others) for various sectors of its technology and hardware support requirements.

After all, if HP grants you a hardware training certification, most employers tend to accept it on the mere basis of their trust in its brand.

However, instead of milking millions of dollars of profits from the power of its brand in education and training, HP simply provides more than 50 certificate courses in technology and other areas of academic interest to the public free of cost, via its eLearning portal. http://www.life-global.org/#courses

Outside of the free learning option, governments around the world are allowed to contract HP to come to their country and host multiple training programs for sometimes less than $50 per person, or free in other instances.

Over at Dell, the options are practically the same.

In the end, you get a globally recognized brand in technology to provide reliable and industry compliant training to your people for free or for less than the price of a case of beer.

But if you think HP and Dell are the only ones that offer you a Professor of Information Technology and expert training in IT for free, then you are dead wrong.

Because over at Harvard, MIT, and the University of Maryland among others, foreign governments can request free ICT training assistance, and quickly see hundreds of their citizens receiving professional technology training from these globally recognized learning institutions practically for free.

So when news broke that the government of Guyana had signed a US$1 million memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the government of India to set up an ICT Centre of Excellence, I immediately knew that some form of economic trickery is at hand.

I can attest to this because I was present in at least two countries where the governments later complained bitterly that India had ended up giving them nothing more than ten teachers and 14 teachers respectively, who barely spoke English and taught Linux in addition to a set of irrelevant courses for a few months.

Then before you knew it, almost all of the tutors used their special visas and statuses to open businesses throughout the main capitals of both countries.

In the end, the people learnt nothing; and the governments were forced to stay quiet for fear of a political backlash from the opposition or the population itself.

The Bahamas and Curacao recognized this a few years back, and are luckily among the few Caribbean countries that had chased India away with their complex ICT Centre proposal. After all, their economic stature and due diligence played a key role.

And if the Guyana government had done its due diligence then they would have discovered that these supposed Centres of Excellence are notoriously launched in poverty stricken countries by India for supposedly ulterior motives – and are nothing more than a conduit for potential economic trickery.

But that’s another story unto itself.

Now, to better understand the idiotic element of the MOU that was recently signed by Guyana, one has to first understand that India is not actually giving the government of Guyana a single cent.

Maybe ten Linux computers that were assembled in India and 20 tutors (who would later transform into overnight businessmen in Guyana) might turn out to be the real deal.

Even more idiotic is the fact that the ICT Centre of Excellence will be based in two classrooms that are already in existence at the National Data Management Centre at the University of Guyana campus.

This should have already raised a red flag since, in Guerilla Economics, this strategy is better known as borrowing the cow to sell its beef and then refunding its owner with a calf.

This element of economic trickery is widely used by India and China in their pursuit for global influence and silent economic rewards.

The reality of this scenario can only be seen if the MOU is examined from outside of the box or if you should apply simple calculating logics to the imaginary US$1 million itself.

I am sure that this money is actually going back into the pockets of these evolving Indian businessmen (teachers) in addition to the person who actually took this idea to the Guyana government.

After all, there are more than 50 other better options than this proposed ICT Centre of Excellence. I am willing to provide them to the Guyana government if they do ask or hold a public consultation on this MOU nonsense.

For beginners, the average cost of one of the better training computers in the world is just about $500.

And since these classrooms definitely cannot hold more than a hundred computers combined, then there is no way they can spend more than $50,000 for that volume of no-discount computers. (The classrooms can actually hold 20 each comfortably in any case. So 100 is being used as an overly sarcastic figure.)

An expert US-trained adjunct professor of information technology earns just around $80,000 per year (in the United States), which can bring us to $160,000 for two of them per year if we are to pay them that super salary in a developing economy like Guyana.

This means that, even with utilities, the total cost of running a program where two or three of the best ICT experts are paid; would have cost the Guyana government no more than about $500,000 for two years, even if you decided to seriously inflate the cost in the name of skullduggery.

So it now begs the question: What is India actually giving Guyana for this US$1 million?

It will be more than benefitting if the Guyana government or the Indian high commission in Guyana can properly answer this question.

Who is actually benefitting from this US$1 million, and how is it being used?

Whoever advised the government of Guyana to sign this MOU should certainly be fired from their post, since it is obvious that they are out of touch with technological reality.

Wouldn’t it had been much wiser to spend $50,000 to upgrade our facilities at the University of Guyana, and ask the University of Maryland, MIT, Dell or HP to help out our situation maybe for the next five years?

An IT qualification from either entity would have been better recognized globally and serve our interest excellently locally, than a certificate from an India sponsored Centre, that is already overridden by an at-home reputation for academic skullduggery and non-recognition.

Something has to be terribly wrong with the technology team that is advising the Guyana government.

Because, for starters, that MOU definitely needs to be rescinded altogether or be renegotiated by people who are technologically competent

IMAGE:  Dennis Adonis is a Guyana-born international journalist, author, and software engineer. As of the May 1, 2015, he has written and published more than 20 books of various genres, in at least five languages. His work in international journalism is widely known; having written for some of the most respected print and digital media outfits in North America and Europe. From the Ebola crisis in Liberia, to the war in Ukraine, he has been on the ground covering some of the most breathtaking and intriguing news events in more than 30 countries worldwide. His literary website is at http://www.dennisadonis.com Contact the author at [email protected]