State College – Lovell admits not enough was done

Harold Lovell, political leader of the United Progressive Party (UPP) has defended the 10-year UPP administration’s record on the dilapidated and overcrowded Antigua State College (ASC) saying that the facility was a “priority” up to the time the party was ousted.
The party left office in June 2014. Lovell was speaking on Friday morning’s OBSERVER AM where he admitted that “on the surface” it was fair to say that both the UPP and the Antigua Barbuda Labour Party (ABLP) had failed to develop the institution.
An unchanging eyesore at the ASC campus at Golden Grove is the derelict and half-complete building beside the ASC’s University of the West Indies (UWI) Undergraduate Department as well as other incomplete construction works at the instution.
“The buildings were funded by the Europeans and they hired a contractor out of Trinidad. The contractor’s company went up because of the CLICO failure. We were in the process of getting alternative funding,” Lovell said.
Lovell, who served as minister of finance for five years, said he “is not sure what happened” to the effort to seek alternative funding which he revealed was to come from the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB).
He suggested that it was a success in and of itself that the UPP administration was able to solicit funding from the European Union (EU) in order to build new structures at the Golden Grove campus. Lovell’s comments come at a time when ASC staff are so fed up with the conditions at the college that they have taken protest action.
(More in today’s Daily Observer)