OPINION: Teachers’ strike action justified, requires honest leadership action

Last Updated on Tuesday, 6 February 2024, 6:34 by Denis Chabrol

by GHK Lall

I support the teachers in their strike action.  Fully, as in being as one with them in their grievances.  It is one unpalatable thing to be the victim of neglect.  It is quite another to be insulted by being denied what is fair and overdue, what circumstances permit, what reeks of arrogance and its reckless exercise.

For starters, the PPP Government and the President have to get it into their heads that this move away from the classroom and to the streets by teachers is about economics.  What is reachable and affordable in the daily battle to cope with something called cost-of-living.  The battle is a grind, and by footsteps long and short a losing one.  Guyanese need help, relief, aid.  Guyanese do not need ministerial and presidential condescension.  Instead of searching for a string of hostile words that thicken red lines, I recommend working towards what brings some measure of relief.  I do not expect it to be total, but it can, at least, be of substance that is meaningful.  Pay.  We should not be talking about the paucity of pay in Guyana for teachers.  Or for anybody.  Not nowadays.  I can only imagine the plight of minimum wage workers.  There is only one word: impoverished.  This is enraging in this society at this time.

For second, the means are present, and one does not have to be a teacher, or a public servant, or a pensioner, to appreciate where the bulk of the economic means is going.  The imbalance is staggering, and no amount of rhapsodizing by the PPP faithful can camouflage the economic injustices and the obscene unfairness.  The pronounced tilts in the national budget make anyone standing for its excesses in one direction, and its meagerness in another, look less than human, less than wise.  Frankly, it makes them look limited, and vacuous to top things off.  I advance further: it makes the president appear chronically unresponsive to the cries of the suffering in Guyana, deeply unconscious to the pain being experienced, and acutely uncaring of the wounds being inflicted by his policies, by his actions and inactions.

For third, the push is on to brand the strike by teachers as ‘political.’  Whenever that word is smeared across legitimate developments in Guyana, those born of anxieties, there is no avoiding this contention: the race card is being subtly played.  People are overwrought from overextension.  And from being forced to grapple with the daily traumas of a marginal, if not miniscule, existence, while unprovided for, and underequipped.  If there is honesty and seriousness on the part of the PPP Government and national leaders about the political and how that operates in local life (real life), then how about those hundreds of billions for insiders, party operators, and other influencers.  In contrast, there is the minimalism of a literal handful of billions for this group and that one.  These are citizens, living and breathing people.  They feel, they see, they interpret.  I think that any chatter about what is political should be swept off the table forthwith.  It does not fit, has no place, and should find no traction.  The more that the willfully blind, and the deliberately dumb, play these cheap games, the sharper the lines become, the more dogged the spirits that are arrayed.  Rebuff and rejection feed resistance.

For fourth, the PPP Government and the President apparently now prefers to act with the complacency of a turtle.  Slow, as in no particular speed, and overly confident in the thickness and hardness of its shell.  No amount of propaganda (political) can ever be a proper substitute for policy.  Policy that is balanced and reasonable.  Policy that is honest and inclusive, with no sector left out.  There has to be the leadership interest in consecrating collective bargaining, workers rights, fairness that fits well with the numbers of the times.  The time has long past for the governmental, presidential, and ministerial huffing and puffing to come to an end.  Instead of any girding for an exhibition of State power, I suggest genuine listening and hearing to struggling servants in their hour of distress.

For fifth, the situation has to have deteriorated so grievously and so undeniably that classrooms and children came second in the considerations of the day.  For sure, that emotional and circumstantial card is going to be employed and reemployed.  But there is that other side of the coin that should not be lost in the clamors surrounding this strike.  There are those consistent psychological affronts that have been wielded at will, and delivered with skill, at teachers calling for a hand with material help in it.  The government needs to get there with President leading the way towards industrial peace.  It has been the president to whom matters such as these have tiered up.  It is the president who has inserted himself time and again when these conditions arise.  Respectfully, President Ali must act now, deliver now.  It must be with what has clean lines, and cleaner strokes, in the provisions that address the grievances that pushed the teachers of Guyana over the brink, and into the streets.