I am in favour of careful use of the pressures that can be brought to bear through resorting to striking when the circumstances leave no choice. The circumstances of teachers in different parts of Guyana have reached that point. The teachers have been appealing through their channels, the PPP Government has been hard of hearing, so full its leaders are with the arrogance of power. No listening. No facing. No meeting. No negotiating. No respecting.
I take a cool tone, a soft approach, on this sensitive situation involving young children, the promise of Guyana. I invite contemporaries, including the comrades from the racial and political tribes of Guyana that detest words and positions. Try examining the circumstances of teachers, their pleas not yet heard, and ask if it has not been so (with every no followed by another no to all the other no(s) that became the norm, the standing leadership practice).
I invite. I do not challenge. For that leads to digging in of heels, and nobody gets anything constructive done, nor succeeds in going anywhere. Not an inch of progress. His Excellency, President Ali had more than enough openings, enough opportunities, to meet with teachers and make some progress, no matter how limited, in dealing with their grievances cleanly. The employment of that word (‘cleanly’) is intended to maintain the softness that is called for in a roiling context. The sharpness of sincerely and sensibly may have more application, but those are discarded. I should have been a negotiator, definitely a peacemaker. The problem is that the latter does not have a long shelf life, as hostilities usually rain from all directions (and elevations).
What are the sources of embedded and widening disgruntlements and resentments in the ranks of Guyanese teachers? Pay is the first one, and it is a big one. They would have read recently of a commission watching out for the interests of Guyanese (at least on paper), and absorbed those making double-digit millions annually.
The gross imbalance, the clearcut politics that favors or bars. This is what the PPP Government and its leaders and propagandists sell as a level playing field, and fair consideration. If our educators at different levels, with different degrees of academic exposure, cannot grasp the frauds and farces behind such contentions, then should not be teachers. They should be pushing wheelbarrows, or breaking bricks with a sledgehammer, still honest labor, all things considered. Teachers hear and watch about those in a sector drawing its dying breath, and which blows a ‘bad, debilitating, wind on Guyana, and there was $6B in the budget for it. Better still, on the heels of those billions, there has come the follow-up, the promise of an increase in pay for the workers in that comatose sector. It is sugar.
Recall the politics mentioned earlier relative to a commission, the numbers that dazzle, and which also ooze. Oozing of who are the insiders and their lot; sugar claimed its place. Then, there are those who qualify as the outsiders of Guyana, and have been accordingly condemned. Those would be teachers, and at a broader level, the wider world of public servants, and to where they also have been consigned. This is what visits the consciousness with insistence that cannot be suppressed.
There is this raw inequity, this jagged imbalance, that pushes teachers to that line that they have held back from crossing. Tomorrow, Monday February 5th, could see it being breached, due to willful neglect by those in government determined to reduce others to beggary, even as those in charge guzzle at the national trough. It is an unwise government that refuses to listen to the cries of the stricken among its people. It is the height of leadership’s callous insensitivity to turn its backs on those who look to them for relief.
It is my view that given what Guyana has in hand currently, the best practices have not been observed in how that has been disbursed. Teachers have been among those victimized, even ostracized in the process of calling attention to their plight. Against the wall that has been erected by the government, there comes a gathering, a development that now seems ready to test its thickness, the substance of its truths. Other workers are watching. They, too, have their share of bitterness and emptiness that intensifies.
I think that it is in the government’s interest to have a conversation, if only to grasp the fullness of emotions and expectations at work. It might work for a moment to curse and condemn one Guyanese found objectionable and unpardonable. It is quite a different undertaking to try to browbeat and batter into submission a hundred, or a thousand, citizens who have legitimate circumstances that cry out for some form of substantial curing. I think that teachers qualify. Rather than resort to the reflex of what is “illegal”, it is more constructive for the appropriate people and leader(s) in the PPP Government to strive genuinely for a way out of what identifies all that is wrong about governance in Guyana today.
