Dear Editor,
In responding to the striking teachers’ demands for salary increases, Junior Minister of Social Protection, Keith Scott said the teachers are “selfish and uncaring” (yesterday’s Sunday Stabroek). This statement exposes not only the anti-working class character of the APNU+ AFC regime, but its unadulterated double standards and hypocrisy.
When the regime awarded its ministers a huge increase in salaries, claiming that they could not be expected to live on their already high salaries by Guyanese standards, was that not an act that was “selfish and uncaring”. It was a slap in the face to the majority of Guyanese, who are expected to survive on a tiny fraction of what ministers earned before their salary increase. It is clear that Keith Scott’s intention was to influence impressionable young minds to believe that the striking teachers are obstacles to their educational achievement, when the real obstacle is the neo-liberal government that he represents.
The teachers and other public sector employees, sugar workers, security guards, petrol pump attendants, small business owners, and the unemployed youth must not allow the bourgeois politicians leading the PNCR, AFC and PPP/C to continue to make fools of them. The removal of these fossilized formations from the political landscape is long overdue.
If we can stand together and focus our energies on the real fight for true independence and economic justice in our lifetime, then the victory of the people is inevitable.
Yours faithfully,
Gerald A. Perreira,
Organization for the Victory of the People
