A few dollars can make a difference

Jan 27, 2015 Editorial

The health of a nation is crucial to its continued existence. Botswana experienced an HIV epidemic to the point that it lost most of its skilled personnel. In the end with international support, the country had to recruit foreign teachers and nurses.
Many of those teachers came from Guyana because those were the people who were not paid the kind of money teachers should be paid. Of course, in Guyana, the salary scale leaves much to be desired. The government would say that the country is poor and given the imposition of the International Monetary Fund, it is forced to restrict its wages bill.
Of course, when Guyana first accepted the IMF prescriptions under the People’s National Congress Government, the country saw mass retrenchment. The then government called the programme redeployment. People were moved from those entities that were considered to be overstaffed and placed elsewhere. But many were simply let go.
Since then, the government has been reluctant to fill vacancies, as part of the programme to cut the labour force. Yet with what available cash there may be in the public treasury, the government is not hiking wages save for the across the board pay increases to combat inflation.
Today, there are Head Teachers, who on retirement will have to find additional work because their pension would be woefully inadequate. This is why the best brains simply leave. Just recently there were those in the society who felt that the private schools were better simply because they are able to attract teachers by way of a better pay.
In Canada, where there is a massive drive to attract skilled people, teachers who left here a decade ago have their own homes and are in a position to buy another in the land of their birth. Many who left Botswana at the end of their contract are in North America earning the kind of money that they simply cannot earn in Guyana.
One view is that the government should review its wages and salaries structure. For its part, the government has been employing contract workers who enjoy the kind of pay that those in the establishment believe that they should but which the regular worker cannot.
Guyana recently began talking about improvements in the education system even as the leading party in the political opposition has been calling for an inquiry into the education system. Such an inquiry may very well find that the best people are not the ones dispensing education. And the reason may be that those who are better qualified seek higher paying jobs, even outside the system.
Countries that are among the leaders in the world pay their teachers and their police officers well. Malaysia, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, all of them, at one time no better than Guyana, say that teachers are among the third highest paid people in their country. Hiking wages in this sector also serves as an incentive for people from overseas.
Guyana is no stranger to attracting teachers from overseas. In the same way that it has been attracting doctors from Cuba and China and India, it once attracted teachers from the Asian sub-continent. Many can still remember teachers from Sri Lanka. These days, there are volunteers from the United States.
Former President Bharrat Jagdeo once said that the smallest rise in the pay of teachers and policemen would significantly bump up the wages bill. However, there is evidence that the economy could sustain a hiked wage bill given the recent expenditures on some projects that have failed to deliver what they were supposed to.
It goes without saying that such pay hikes would be an investment in the same way some of the projects are touted as investments. People would remain in the country to ply their trade and the country would benefit. It would produce more skilled people to satisfy its needs at this time when skills are being sought.

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