My overall finding is that the Gov’t can pay much more than the 6.5% it has offered teachers

Two events usually attract misinformation, once known as propaganda. These are wars and strikes. In a war, each side pushes information to show that it is doing better than the enemies - in fatalities, losses and territory. In a strike, the employer understates the support for the strike while the workers’ representatives overstate that support and the moral imperatives of their cause. In similar vein, I have seen numbers cited by some closer to the facts, such as the Chief Education Officer and the leadership of the Teachers’ Union.

In the case and context of the current strike I went to sources I consider most objective, if not always very clear - the 2024 Estimates. From these, I could make some reasonable assumptions and deductions on the affordability of any increase. What I also found is that some of the numbers cited by some non-associated persons like Dr. Tara Singh were off the mark by quite significant margins. My overall finding is that the Government can pay much, much more than the 6.5% it has offered teachers.

I say this even as I concede that the Estimates are not the easiest of documents to read and that the reader has to plow through dozens and dozens of pages and make rough assumptions arising therefrom, including how the averages pan out. Here are some of those numbers. The provision in the 2024 Estimates shows an increase in the allocation for Wages and Salaries for teachers, exclusive of related overhead costs, of 25% over 2023. Of course, the number of teachers is also expected to increase, even after natural attrition. The crude average annual increase in the number of teachers over the past three completed years was approximately 9%. The projection for 2024 is 14% of which we can assume that the significant increase will come at the beginning of the new academic year in September. From this, we can deduce an increase in the effective number of teachers for the school year to be about 5%.

Let us then assume that the Government is unwilling to make this up via savings from part of the total capital budget or by way of supplementary appropriation, the 2024 Budget appears to allow a 20% increase to the teachers for 2024. Except for some related costs that are ad valorem, the other charges are already provided for in the approved Estimates.

The Government can afford this and the teachers deserve nothing less.