A shameless attempt to cover up an embarrassing political blunder

ON Thursday October 24, the Honourable Minister of Education, Priya Manickchand, held a press briefing to announce to the nation that five Guyanese students topped the entire Caribbean in this year’s Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examination.

Then on Thursday October 31, while delivering brief remarks at the Ministry of Education’s 17th National Award Ceremony for Outstanding Performance at the National Cultural Centre, she made the following statement: “It is absolutely disgraceful, shameful… with all we have to celebrate. Eight days ago we announced to this nation that five of our Guyanese sons and daughters topped the Region, the whole Caribbean… other countries are celebrating us and blogging about us and writing editorials about us… so it is absolutely shameful and disgraceful that not one single leader of the Opposition as yet has found it appropriate to congratulate our children.”
In a letter last Monday, “Minister Manickchand shouldn’t use students’ achievements to gain political mileage” (Kaieteur News, November 3), the AFC Leader, Khemraj Ramjattan asserted that “I have commented on several AFC television shows across the country that these students deserve our praises.”
This is not true. This is a shameless attempt to cover up an embarrassing political blunder. At least David Granger had the decency not to lie about his party’s failure to recognise the outstanding academic achievement of the ‘Magnificent Five.’
I therefore challenge Khemraj Ramjattan to publish the dates of any television show or any newspaper article where he or any member of the AFC expressed any form of congratulatory remarks to Yogeeta Persaud; Cecil Cox; Sasha Woodroffe; Rafena Mustafa; and Zimeena Rasheed, for receiving the Caribbean’s Most Outstanding awards at the 2013 CSEC examinations. And if he cannot do so, an apology to the Honourable Minister of Education and to those five students is appropriate.

In an effort to distance himself from Minister Manickchand’s accusation, Ramjattan referred to an AFC press conference held on August 14, 2013 “after the results were made known to the public, I was present when appropriately our Youth Section leader, Mr. Trevor Williams, read out an AFC press release which was carried extensively in the Stabroek News of August 15, 2013.” Additionally, he said that the following was printed in the AFC’s column in Kaieteur News on August 18, 2013: “The Alliance For Change (AFC) wishes to congratulate the top performers at the 2013 sittings of the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) and the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE).”
Mr Ramjattan may be a lawyer, but judging from the above time-line, he’s not a very smart one. When he and Trevor Williams issued those congratulatory remarks, they were congratulating the National “top performers at the 2013 sittings of the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) and the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE).”
But when Minister Manickchand said “It is absolutely shameful and disgraceful that not one single leader of the opposition as yet has found it appropriate to congratulate our children”, she was obviously referring to the ‘Magnificent Five’ who copped five out of the eight CXC awards. This announcement was known to the nation only during the minister’s press briefing on Thursday, October 24. So it would have been highly impossible for Khemraj Ramjattan and his AFC to issue statements of congratulations to the Regional awardees, 71 days before on August 14.

And in his usual cock-eyed way of distorting the evidence before him, Ramjattan made this ludicrous reference to the minister, “She must know by now that these superlative performances by our Caribbean winners had nothing specifically to do with her ministry or her PPP government, but everything to do with their personal attributes; their outstanding parents’ support; and private lessons, and (in a couple of cases) the private teachers provided to them.”
Although personal attributes; supportive parents and teachers played a major role in these students’ magnificent performance, it would have been tremendously more difficult without the government’s unwavering commitment to the education sector as reflected in education being allocated the largest sectorial share of resources in our national budget: $28.7 Billion this year and $26.5 Billion last year. With this allocation, the Ministry of Education was able to train more teachers and ensure all schools receive the necessary resources and teaching aids to produce increasingly better results year after year. Anyone but an unscrupulous politician with his own agenda would have seen that.

But this new trend of attacking Education Minister Priya Manickchand is sure to backfire, as it will only strengthen her resolve and make her more popular than she is presently.
The many parents, teachers and students who have come to know this hard-working, dedicated public servant, can testify to her sincerity and commitment to doing the very best for Guyana’s children. But as I’m so often reminded, dogs don’t bark at parked cars. It must be that she’s viewed as a potential threat to the Opposition, as they’re using every nasty trick in the book to discredit, frustrate and distract this honourable woman at a time when she is poised to raise standards in English and Mathematics and has just introduced Portuguese as a new foreign language in schools. But if she succeeds, as I’m confident she will, there will be nothing left for the AFC and PNC/APNU to be critical of the education sector again.
I hope I’m wrong, but is this a strategic ploy designed by the Joint Opposition to stymie the progress of education under the PPP/C? I wonder.

HARRY GILL

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