Thursday, November 24, 2005

Yes oui

Yesterday, I attended my second PTA meeting at my daughter’s school. As usual, the principals of the primary (junior) and secondary (senior) departments gave a report on the term to date, an overview of the school’s ongoing rebuilding plans, etc.

In his report, the secondary school principal mentioned that as part of the end-of-term activities, Forms 3, 4 & 5 would be participating in a seminar/workshop regarding the CSME and its implications as relates to their future educational/employment opportunities.

It is sad to realize that a bunch of 15 years-old students are going to know more about the Single Market than 99.5% of the Grenadian population. Heck! They’re going to know more than I do. What I know about the CSME I learnt from reading Barbados newspapers. Our government has long been criticised for a lack of coordination, consultation and foresight on other issues of national importance and their handling of CSME has been no different. The vast majority of people barely know what the CSME is, what our plan is to deal with the critical issues of freedom of labour, investment and trade, what it really means to the average person on the street.

Couple this with the revelation that come January 2006, we are supposed to start paying our 5% income tax... oops.. um... our contribution to the Rebuilding & Development Fund (or whatever fancy name they call it this week) – I tell y’all, I don’t know how we go be making it next year nuh.

Makes me feel like going back to high school. Remember those days? Life did look nice back then, eh?

Posted byYY at 10:53 am View blog reactions