Dear Editor,
I am an admirer of Justice Sandil Kissoon’s sagacity. However, I believe the judge made a mistake this time. If the status quo must be maintained, then it should return to work for pay. Let the rights and wrongs be examined in court while the teachers return to their students. If this is a law abiding society, then all will have to abide by the final decision. The strike has no purpose now, because I understand the teachers are only asking for honest collective bargaining as in the Guyana Constitution, where the government employers show up and genuinely treat the GTU representatives respectfully. After the collective bargaining, strike or other action is still possible. There is hope that sense will now prevail and wait on the law.
What I should like our teachers to understand is that students must be taught by example, correctly and in context. Correctly by example means that those teachers who might have been involved in helping rig elections should come clean and denounce the rigging they might have seen. And all teachers (not only Maths teachers) should publicly distance themselves from a wrong arithmetic that denied that 33 is a majority of 65. It should enter the syllabus for teacher training to help expunge the shame it brought.
In context by example means that teachers must understand and teach that the current contract Guyana has with the oil companies is unfairly weighted towards the oil companies and ought to be renegotiated to help get fair wages that the governments say they can’t pay. Teachers must become educated enough to recognize and identify things that are wrong. E.g., it is wrong to say that the oil companies take all the risk, while we enjoy 52% profits. They take no risk. Every venture is paid for by cost oil charged to Guyana, which cost is kept a secret from the citizens to avoid accountability. If a well comes up dry, it is Guyana who pays for the drilling. And the arithmetic of the 52% is wrong, brazenly blazed on billboards greeting visitors to the country, and perpetuated by our politicians, who don’t seem to realize that because of lack of ring fencing that can only happen when the oil is running out and the profit is a percentage of a low return.
The next generation must also become educated to cope with the decommissioning and other expenses that will be inherited after the oil companies have left with 85.5% of the oil extracted.
Yours sincerely,
Alfred Bhulai
Long-serving teacher in Guyana
