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Jagdeo defends spending billions on failing sugar industry but refuses to raise teacher’s salaries
Kaieteur News – As teachers around the country protested for increases in their salaries among other issues last Thursday, Vice President (VP) Bharat Jagdeo defended pumping billions of dollars into the failing sugar industry while refusing to raise the salaries of educators.
Vice President, Bharrat Jagdeo.
On Thursday at his weekly press conference at the Office of the President, the VP said that the sugar workers are the “whipping horses” of racism.
The VP was asked by this publication about the government’s continued propping up of the failing sugar industry with multi-billion allocations while refusing to pay teachers a better salary.
“The sugar workers are the whipping horse because of racism. If we had terminated 7000 workers who are mainly Afro-Guyanese in anytime in this government, under the PPP government, everybody would be up in arms, but that happened under APNU and nobody pays attention to it,” he said.
“There are like minded persons who are continuously pushing the racism and they cannot get out of that mindset,” he said, adding that it results in the sugar workers constantly being the whipping horse for the race argument. “Once the country’s economy was sustained by the “Sugar Levy” as it was responsible for nearly half of all revenue as the other sector were failing,” he argued.
“When it sustained Guyana nobody spoke about that. We just sat here and said we’re giving $5B to the sugar industry this year in the budget but we have over $4.5B to subsidize electricity in Linden and Kwakwani and not a word about that so that they would pay cheaper rates we are paying the electricity bill. You take $4.5B and you divide it by the number of people who live in these areas, and you will see what (is) the per capita allocation they’re getting is, it runs over to $300,000 per person that they are getting from the treasury,” Jagdeo stated.
He noted that the PPP/C government does not give every sugar worker $300,000 and even though they are working, they do not make that amount of money.
The VP suggested that citizens, “contrast the experience with the bauxite industry how we treated bauxite workers in all of the areas. How we treated the public service. You know the irony of it is that they are saying that this government has ethnically cleansed the public service, and then say simultaneously that we are punishing the public service because it’s mainly Afro-Guyanese. That is the contradiction, we have ethnically cleansed it but we are now punishing it because it’s mainly Afro-Guyanese, it’s disingenuous.”
At Thursday’s press conference, the Vice President dodged questions on whether the government will at some point engage the Guyana Teachers’ Union (GTU) to negotiate increase in salaries and other conditions for teachers.
The VP instead claimed that the government has met about sixty-percent of the union’s demands as it relates to creating better working conditions for teachers. “Not everything has to be about wages, it could be about training of teachers, scholarships for teachers, it should be about housing for teachers,” he said.
He added that, “the 100 billion we spent on house lots, teachers will also benefit from that, the road we build for communities teachers will also benefit from that…”
Jagdeo made the notion even as the GTU marked day four of its nationwide teacher strike and protest action.
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