Dear Editor,
The approach being used by the PPP/C administration to distribute the $10,000 grant to parents of children who attend the government schools demonstrates anything but ‘care’ as is shouted by the massive, expensive billboards all across the country. In fact it is just another example of the crass contempt and callous disdain with which the PPP/C continues to regard poor ordinary Guyanese.
Where is the care and concern for the parents and the students who must forgo their jobs, their schooling and other personal commitments on one specific day to gather en masse at a designated location so that the PPP can satisfy its insatiable appetite for cheap political mileage?
Apart from enduring the sweltering heat from our present drought conditions, parents and students have no choice but to listen to the verbiage of President Donald Ramotar who makes it appear that $10,000 will put an end to the suffering of all the poor people spread out before his very eyes: people who could have better spent their time earning additional dollars to add to the paltry sum of $10,000, to deal with the harsh economic realities they face under the PPP administration.
Many of those parents may be self-employed or may be working for private companies that do not pay a dime to workers who are absent, (and this is something that the government should look into) even when they present a medical certificate.
Additionally, some parents may have children attending school in different educational districts and may therefore have to engage in this tedious exercise more than once.
After all this, the PPP then takes these poor people back to the bread lines of the 1980s, which the PPP itself never fails clamour about as the darkest era in our political and social history. Ordinary poor and desperate people must line up for hours in the blazing sun to receive their blessing from the hands of these tin gods.
Why then condemn the PNC? Is there a difference between this forced gathering of people at the numerous public squares out of a necessity created by the PPP’s maladministration, and the gathering of people who had a similar need, at the Hope Estate under Forbes Burnham?
If the PPP really cared they would have made allowances, like they do with the annual $1500 school uniform voucher, for parents to receive monies at their own convenience at the schools their children attend. It is about time that Guyanese as a nation recognize the PPP for what it really is: a party in government that cares only about itself, and cares nothing about the people other than to use them to further its own self-interest.
Yours faithfully,
Deon Abrams
Educator and
Community Activist