A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) yesterday blasted the public education system, while calling on government to urgently implement sex education programmes in schools.
Speaking at a press conference yesterday, APNU Leader David Granger frontally addressed the recordings that have surfaced featuring children from a secondary school engaging in sex acts, even as the Education Ministry has launched an investigation.
“Sex happens. Boys and girls reaching the age of puberty, experience changes in their bodies and it is predictable that they will have heightened interest in the opposite sex,” he said.
“Handling of the case must go back to the responsibility of Ministry of Education to conduct better sex education programmes and better management to prevent such activities,” he added.
He also expressed alarm at the staggering 7,000 annual school dropouts the Education Ministry has reported, while saying that measures should be in place to tackle this as children who do not complete elementary education will find it difficult to get jobs as adults.
Turning attention to rising unemployment among youth, Granger said this was another area being neglected by government and one that hat this could lead to a youth crisis.
“Unemployment is the central issue affecting young people,” he said. “The government’s delay in dealing with the jobs crisis and its disregard for measures to solve it can detonate a social explosion which could have dangerous consequences “he said.
“Young people suffer most, owing to the fact that school-leavers are inexperienced and have a long wait before they find their first job,” he added.
These are among the reasons, Granger said that even as the governing PPP/C marks 22 years in power this month, it has no positive developments to show.
“What does the People’s Progressive Party have to celebrate?” Granger rhetorically asked yesterday.
The APNU leader said that the PPP’s silence, given its traditional public celebratory stance every year on October 5, seems to signal that the party shares APNU’s view that it is failing. Granger said he has noticed that there are no public “parties and open celebrations” to mark the occasion.
“The PPP does not seem to understand why it is failing and why it has lost the trust and confidence even of its once staunch supporters. The party finds itself being rejected by the public because its concept of democracy was never about creating autonomous local democratic and other collective structures to empower communities,” he said.
Listing what his party believes are other non-achievements or degradation of sectors, he pointed to the rise in armed robberies, maritime piracy, fuel and contraband smuggling and narco driven crime as he opined that there is now a public security crisis.
Public service agencies being starved of necessary resources to execute daily duties was also cited.
And while he welcomed the establishment of the Special Organised Crime Unit (SOCU), Granger said this agency should be autonomous and “not be a sub of the Financial Intelligence Unit. He said the Director of Public Prosecutions should instead be made to work alongside SOCU as to help prosecutions. He said while government may want to boast about the FIU, to date there has not been a single prosecution.
