Six percent is the splatter of spit in the face. Six percent is a slap with an open palm across the cheek. Six percent is a sickness that sicker people come up with, passed on, pushed to the center of the table. Is the PPP Government serious about partnering with teachers in Guyana’s public school system? If it is, then six percent is not the answer, doesn’t even come close. Is the PPP Government really about caring for the children of Guyana? If it is, then six percent is a strange way to show that care. Perhaps, the children don’t matter that much in the great government picture, aside from smooth talk and sweet speeches.
Whatever is going on behind the scenes in PPP Government circles, decisions like these push to one place repeatedly: this country will continue to be bruised and broken, punctured and pushed apart. Everything is going up, from rent to reaching the workplace and shopping places (supermarkets and markets) to returning home at the end of the month (or week) with what is needed to pay the usual pile of bills. In a healthy and young family, it is crippling. In an older and not so vibrant household, with a sick to care for, prices are a killer, sucking the breath out of citizens who are not part of the connected elites.
When reports from the mouths of citizens make it into the public sphere, the prices of most basic ingredients for a meal of some substance are going into the stratosphere, with double-digit percentage increases the norm. The percentage increase is an ever upward moving target, and it is food that they are talking about. It is not necessarily a balanced meal, with all the nutritional components recommended by the health experts present. Whatever is available, is affordable to make a meal, will just have to do. It is part of the losing battle fought daily with cost of living, in what has been reduced to nothing but the grimness of survival.
This is the harsh context in which a supposedly caring, partnering, thinking government comes up with six percent and casually places it before the teachers of Guyana. Who are the planners, the visionaries, the bean counters that came up with this abomination, this insult, of six percent in a Guyana that is withdrawing and withdrawing billions from the oil fund of Guyanese?
At the end of July, just seven months into this year, over GY$175 billion has been taken out of the Natural Resources Fund that sits so temptingly, so irresistibly, in a New York bank. What were those billions spent on specifically? In keeping with the times and culture, the corrupt practices alone enmeshed in those billions could pay teachers for years to come, if not decades. What will the accounting for them look like, which is moot, for by that time the billions would be gone, and Guyana’s teachers would still be weighing where they went wrong. That is, what they could and should have done, but didn’t.
By my assessment, trusting and working with the movers and decision makers in a callous and depravedly indifferent PPP Government is a one-way street. There is no return to those yielding an inch and opening the door through some trusting that goodwill extended will be goodwill reciprocated. I am sure that the pundits and propagandists in the PPP Government’s army will find some rationale to insist that the six percent offer qualifies as generous and what goes a long way to address the gap(s) existing between the two now adversarial and, I believe, irreconcilable parties.
Most Guyanese know by now, -those with some learning, some semblance of a conscience will so admit-that six percent to any group, be it in the public sector or the private sector, falls far short of the mark. Money mark. Respectful mark. Existence mark. Calming and continuity mark. To be clear, I am talking about when the times are good, and citizens (teachers, public servants, minimum wage workers) are not lagging so much behind. Not only not lagging but not languishing in the agony of their circumstances.
Now imagine the psychic difficulty with six percent. Or consider the difference that six percent makes in the lives of those who need multiples of that paltry and demoralizing number [six percent] to hold their heads above water, to breathe a little more freely, a bit more confidently. I ask whether that is what should not be in a country deemed to be the richest in the world, and with citizens to match.
What could be the objective of this PPP Government six percent to teachers? The most circumspect aspect of me can only think of what is intended to twist the knife in the gut, the expectations, of teachers. Getting even, grinding in the dust, and goring to draw blood, to teach a lesson for daring to standup, challenge the dominance of their betters. Try as I may, it eludes me about how six percent contributes to oneness of mind, oneness of vision, oneness of spirit. To my way of thinking, six percent to teachers represents oneness in nothing. In all frankness, this smirking, scorning, six percent is not even charity. Take this one from me. Try that with a beggar in the street and the reaction will not be liked. So, now new lines have been drawn. How they will be crossed is unforeseen.
