Chief Government Whip and Highways Minister Johnston Fernando says sinister political elements have disrupted children’s education again.

Speaking to journalists after a progress review meeting at his Ministry yesterday, the Minister said that schools had been closed here following the outbreak of the global pandemic. “The teachers however tried their level best to teach the children by opting for online education. They did so despite many technical and financial challenges. Most of them even spent out of their own pockets to teach the children. We respect and are grateful to those teachers for their dedicated service. But the unions of the three percent party dragged those teachers to the roads for protests and rallies thereby disrupting the online education and putting the future of our children in jeopardy and exposing the lives of those teachers to the deadly virus. This is not the first time that this three percent group has disrupted the education of the children of this country. There are enough instances that they did so. They killed many teachers, shut down the schools and universities, dragged the school children to protests and paved the way for the collapse of education during the 1987-1990 period of terror. They even brought the appellation of land of cannibals to this nation. Their actions created backlogs in university education delaying the education process for years and an entire generation had to suffer as a result.  

The President and the Prime Minister have pledged to rectify this 24-year-old issue of salary anomalies in the teaching profession. We have determined that we would not leave it to another government to solve. We have four more years to solve this problem once and for all. Knowing that we would rectify the errors that created salary anomalies, the bankrupt unionists instigate the teachers to take to the streets. The union leaders seem to have the opportunistic plan to show off that the problem would be solved due to their protests and to claim credit for it. However, by opting for this course of action, they not only disrupted the education of children but also put the lives of teachers in danger. The teachers who attend protests to hold up placards in the road and participate in marches violating all health guidelines finally go to their homes carrying the deadly virus with them. By doing so they also put the lives of their family members in danger. Thereby the unionists put the lives of the entire population of 22 million in danger by paving the way for the fourth wave of the pandemic in this country.

“Although we as a nation have been hit hard by the pandemic, we continue to pay the salaries of teachers and other public servants unlike many other countries. We call on the unionists not to hold the future and education of our children to ransom to achieve their narrow political objectives. The dream of every parent is to provide a decent education for their children and I call on the cabal of unionists not to shoot that dream down by the gun called narrow political gains. The most worthwhile thing that the teachers could do at this time is to help restore the education of children. In Russia Lenin once said that the best should be to the children, but our local Stalin is disrupting our children’s education.”