Justice Kissoon finally offered the written ruling on the teachers’ strike. Up to now, all the teachers had heard was they could go out and strike and still had to be paid by the Government!! Talk about having your cake and eating it, too!! In this case, the teachers could be eating their cake even as they struck again, signalled by some milling around in front of some schools!! The rest could be sleeping in at their homes!!
The justification for his ruling was that “the teachers asked for bread and the government gave them stone”. As far as your Eyewitness could gather – and he confesses he fell asleep often in Sunday School – the Bible inspired this. He looked it up and – lo and behold! – there it was in Matthew 7:9-11 “Which of you if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake?” The Good Justice saw the Government as a father to the teachers, who wouldn’t have it in him to stiff his kids. Filial love and all that!!
Now, while your Eyewitness is no lawyer – much less a legal luminary to cross pens with the Good Justice- if he was gonna be using the Good Book for precedent, then what’s sauce for the goose oughta be sauce for the gander. He remembered this nugget from his dissolute youth, since it was so frequently hurled in his direction by his Sunday School teacher: “For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: “If a man will not work, he shall not eat. We hear that some among you are idle. They are not busy; they are busybodies. Such people we command and urge in the Lord Jesus Christ to settle down and earn the bread they eat.” Your Eyewitness had gotten the word then, and he wondered what the Good Justice would say to this homily!!
Sadly, after his foray into the Biblical realm in his original pronouncement, in his written judgement, he went back to the dry-as-bones legal convolutions. He says he wasn’t just guided by our Constitution – the HIGHEST law in the land! – but referred to international charters and such like to interpret matters on human rights. Which evidently included the right to strike and yet be paid!! His justification was that, over the past three years, the Government had deliberately shown bad faith in a “…wilful, deliberate and systematic suppression and denial of those core human rights that are fundamental to labour”!! Whew!!
This had vitiated the Government’s recourse to the Common Law (and the Bible) which said folks gotta work to be paid!! CCJ anyone??
…teaching Spanish
There was a decision to make the teaching of Spanish COMPULSORY in our public schools. Now, as far as your Eyewitness knows, up to now, only some of the elite secondary schools have made Spanish compulsory as a subject – when writing CSEC. The explanation is that this will make our graduates “more marketable” when entering the world of work. Now, in all honesty, the only way your Eyewitness thinks this can be justified is if we’ll be taking over Venezuela after Mad Maduro’s madness – and will need Guyanese to administer it.
It can’t be that we’re “surrounded” by Spanish speaking countries, since only Venezuela qualifies – Brazil speaks Portuguese and Suriname speaks Dutch. God knows what language Trinis speak!! And it can’t be because of increasing trade relations with the rest of South America: the US became tied economically to China since the 1980s, and now have the largest bilateral trading figures in the world, but we haven’t seen many Americans conversing in Mandarin!!
So Mad Maduro’s forewarned??
…the journalistic sniping
The public is being regaled with blow-by-blow reports of a catfight in the Guyana Press Association. Seems the present Executive wanna squat on their offices for a faaaar longer period than the Granger govt did in 2020!!
