Manickchand to GTU, “protest outside Congress Place”

EDUCATION MINISTER PRIYA MANICKCHAND IS ENCOURAGING THE GUYANA
TEACHERS’ UNION (GTU) TO PROTEST outside Congress Place, the headquarters of the
main opposition Peoples National Congress (PNC), for unpaid uniform allowances for its
members dating in 2019.
“We issued a circular on the 29 th of June that the Union is aware of, that addresses the payment
of voucher allowance for teachers from 2020 and 2021. The Union then came back to say that
the APNU+AFC did not pay the teachers in 2019,” minister Manickchand explained.
“You need to take that protest outside of Congress Place because that is not my responsibility,”
Ms. Manickchand said.
Currently, the education ministry is making queries to ascertain which regions were paid the
allowances for the year under dispute.
“We are now in the process…of checking which region was not paid in 2019. Last week 100
duty free concessions were approved for teachers in the teaching service submitted by the union,
these are all things that we have in our agreement,” she explained.
Manickchand blasted the GTU General Secretary, Ms. Coretta Mc Donald, whom she criticised
for regurgitating, uncritically, everything that her party, the APNU+AFC, says.
Manickchand said she expected Mc Donald’s to oppose the government’s multi-billion dollar
‘Because We Care’ cash grant initiative because it let it up to individual parents to decide how
to spend the $19, 000 they will receive.
“I am not surprised that Ms. Mc Donald has a different view, Ms. Mc Donald’s party while in
office quit the cash grant programme, abolished it, took away money from children, took away
money from their parents and said very clearly that they thought it was a wasteful expenditure.

We have made no secret of the fact from 2014 to now that we believe that this is a good
expenditure, an investment into our families.”
“We started this programme in 2014, it was collapsed by Ms. Mc Donald’s government, we put
in our manifesto that we were restoring the cash grant (because) we believe that this is a useful
expenditure on our families, an investment in our children, a useful expenditure, and so we do
not hold Ms. Mc Donald’s dictatorial view that we must decide or we must have her decide how
this money must be spent. If Ms. Mc Donald wants to do that, she would have to get herself
elected and that is a distant, unlikely reality. So, she will have to continue to bellow on issues
like this,” the Minister said.