At a press conference yesterday at PSA’s headquarters, Abercromby Street, Port-of-Spain, Duke said one of the deficiencies of the current pension system was that retired people have to wait several years to collect their pension.

He gave the example of former workers of the National Housing Authority (NHA) and the Housing Development Corporation (HDC) who have suffered tremendously as they await on HDC to address their pension issue.

“Since last year May we have been receiving letters that the pension plan is almost completed that it was the actuaries fault. Now we are hearing it is the fault of Comptroller of Accounts. These workers are out of pocket, they are frustrated, they have to buy medication, they have to survive. We are demanding that the pension department and the Comptroller of Accounts become more technical and that the they update their staff to become more technical and that the resources by which these persons worked to carry out meticulous tasks be upgraded,” he said.

One retired worker, Muata Kosie said he retired from HDC in December 2014 and has been living off his National Insurance Scheme (NIS) pension of $3,000.

“Of that I pay for my vehicle.

Having to pay for my vehicle leaves with a total $700 for the month so my take home is $700 it has been so for the past year.

The gratuity they gave me ran out quite a while now. To date I am at this point very distraught and close to starvation,” he said.

Duke called on the government to do two things within this year to address the deficiencies in the system.

“One should ensure that all pensioners benefit from the survivors benefit which means that if the pensioner dies a spouse or next of kin continues to receive the pension.

The second thing is that all the pensions in the public sector are fixed pension which means if you retire and you’re receiving a pension, your pension would be fixed for life. We wish to recommend that all pensions in the public service and the public sector those pensions be indexed against the inflation and or indexed against the GDP,” he said.

He said all pensioners must receive an increase yearly by nothing less than five percent.

“This ensures all pensioners are not out of pocket again. It ensures all pensioners are able to pay their bills and survive expensive medication,” he said.

Duke said they were giving the government until April to meet with the union.

“That’s when things are going to reach a fever pitch in this country, people have lives to live and if they are not treating it seriously, we will take to the streets and when we take to the streets we would not stop,” he said.

This committee is chaired by Independent Senator David Small. Other members are Social Development and Family Services Minister Cherrie-Ann Crichlow-Cockburn, Laventille East/Morvant MP Adrian Leonce and Opposition Senator Wade Mark.

The Senate sits on Tuesday at Tower D from 1.30 pm, when Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi is expected to lead off debate on the Miscellaneous Provisions (Trial by Judge Alone) Bill 2017.

The House of Representatives sits on Wednesday from 1.30 pm to continue debate on the Indictable Offences (Pre-Trial Procedure) Bill, 2017. Debate is also scheduled to start on the International Financial Organisations (Corporacion Andina de Fomento) Bill, 2017.

The letter was issued on Thursday by attorney Douglas Bayley who is representing the parents of 14-year old Darrio Persad, a student of San Fernando West Second ary School. Persad suffered memory loss after a fellow student repeatedly punched him and slammed his head against a wall one month ago. According to the letter, Persad has not regained his memory.

Bayley, who is being instructed by attorney Anand Ramlogan, wrote that the letter was the third sent by his firm to the Ministry of Education on behalf of students who were victims of bullying.

The first was the Presentation College San Fernando student who, as a result of an attack, had to have one of his testicles removed and the second was Tristan Khan of Mayaro Government Primary whose hand was dislocated and broken by a classmate during recess.

“It is the height of injustice and the cruelest of ironies that the bullies who attacked and injured my clients are back in school after a seven-day suspension whilst their victims continue to miss school because of the pain and suffering they have inflicted and the severity of their injuries,” wrote Bayley.

The letter detailed a narrative of alleged negligence in Persad’s case involving the school’s principal who kept Persad’s family in the dark about the details of the incident until the day after it occurred, and further tried to persuade them to not report it to the police. It also alleges that the Ministry of Education and the School Supervisor tried to persuade Persad’s parents to not publicise a video which captured the entire incident to Facebook.

The letter said the family also felt as if they were not taken seriously by the San Fernando Police Station when a report was first made and were only seriously acknowledged after the video of the attack went viral on social media when it was posted by unknown persons.

Bayley also submitted a Freedom of Information application for copies of all statements collected through investigations into Persad’s attack and for copies of the various standards and protocols for dealing with incidents of bullying in schools.

The Ministry of Education has 28 days to respond after receiving the letter

According to reports, Andy Ramjuman was standing behind his stall when he was approached by a gunman, who shot him in the left leg.

Passers-by alerted police from the Chaguanas station, who responded and cordoned off the area. The gunman was nowhere to be found.

Ramjuman was taken to the Chaguanas Health Facility, then transferred to the Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex, where he was treated and remains in serious but stable condition.

Police have ruled out robbery as a motive for the shooting, since none of Ramjuman’s cash or valuables were taken.

Yesterday, members of the Central Division interviewed him and took a statement.

It seems to be part of the PNM Carnival ritual. I wonder just how realistic or sincere it is.

Garcia disclosed that 81 percent of secondary school students and 74 percent of primary school students stayed away from classes last Ash Wednesday.

According to his ministry, students’ average attendance at the secondary level was 18.28 percent this year, compared with 22.8 percent last year. At the primary level, it was 26.3 percent as against 31 percent last year. At the same time, the average attendance of secondary school teachers was 77.6 percent and 81.2 percent for primary schools.

The minister also reportedly queried the poor representation at the schools’ chutney soca competition by students of some of the Hindu schools.

Today, it seems to me that schoolchildren are asked to engage in Carnival events that closely mirror adult competitions. And these events are school-based and presumably exert some degree of pressure on both the teachers and students and, by extension, parents, to have students participate in several of these tiring events.

Furthermore, there are child soca artistes and children participating in both the adult and children’s pan competitions. I would wager that teenage students participate just as vigorously as their adult counterparts in all aspects of the Carnival — including perhaps alcohol consumption and sex. After all, we are told that it is integral to “our culture.” Garcia’s Government has exhibited much zeal in pointing to absenteeism among students following the Carnival. That problem is perhaps as pervasive among the adult workforce as it is among students.

The Ash Wednesday Maracas cool-down has been assimilated into “our culture” as much as the national instrument.

It is fair to ask whether absenteeism is more prevalent among public sector workers than those employed in the private sector. If this is normative behaviour among the adult workforce and has become a “cultural” norm, is he not being disingenuous to the point of hypocrisy, to demand different standards from adolescents? Clearly, he cannot turn a blind eye to adult public servants while singling out their children. There has been much talk of “elitism” and the absence of “equity” regarding access to quality education. Stemming from this, TT Unified Teachers Association and other key stakeholders have been bashing the infamous Concordat arrangement as the principal instrument of this “inequity.” Hardly anything has been said of existing deficits within the government-run school system.

Eighty-five percent of students in denominational (prestige) schools come from two-parent homes while in the case of government- run schools the figure is 50 percent. As if to stack the odds against these latter children further, denominational schools are single-sex schools as opposed to co-educational State-run schools.

Research here has shown clearly that single-sex schools perform better.

Minister Garcia’s apparent disingenuous concern over post-Carnival student attendance amounts to no more than a ritualistic whine. It represents but a part of a far deeper and more complex societal dysfunction that PNM governments have been nurturing over their decades presiding over a rudderless cultural evolution. But, say what.

The youth of today are the revellers of tomorrow. Should we be concerned? Steve Smith via email

What have we become? Just now we will be buying gas and oil from Guyana, a country that we loaned hundreds of millions of dollars to and then wrote off.

Gordon Dalla Costa via email

The Muslim marriage age is 12 years.

So why did Calypso Monarch Chalkdust use age 14 if he did not discriminate against Hindus? A more indiscriminating title would have been “75 cannot go into 16 and under.” Chalkdust should apologise to the Hindu community.

DEV SUPERSAD Fyzabad

As a young man growing up in the country and of East Indian stock, I was made to see Carnival in terms of “we” and “they,” we as spectators and they as the creators and participants, often harbouring thoughts about us being “spiritual,” Shivratri being the festival celebrated in Hindu communities like mine during Carnival, and they being of the “devil,” a misconception arising out of my boyish response to “pay the devil” syndrome.

Not that I was any ardent advocate of this kind of dichotomised thinking.

Carnival Tuesday for me was more being the willing victim of owners of cinemas in San Fernando who shortchanged avid customers like myself by “cutting” shows to increase the number shown and so maximise attendance and profit.

But when I became a man I put away such childish thinking. Carnival took on a different picture with my acquired sense of being a Trinidadian away from the ethno-religious considerations of my early childhood.

I was now seeing Carnival as a mark of our unique creativity as one people, pretty as a rainbow, with a diversity not despite of, but because of our difference, of which the mas of Lionel Jagessar and Ivan Kalicharan in San Fernando and of Brian MacFarlane and Peter Minshall in Port-of- Spain, inter alia, is ample illustration.

But of late that oneness as a people, that unity in diversity, has taken on added significance in a world filled with so much ethnic strife, blood and violence.

I watched the parade of bands on TV, filled, among others, with so many beautiful women, some petite and polished, delicate and genteel in their “wining,” and others big and buxom, almost raucous and blithe in their gyrations, all beautiful in their own way, seemingly in a trance-like ethereal state, as it was all total enjoyment with no threat to their safety.

And I couldn’t help but think of another woman far away in Europe or the Middle East or other, equally beautiful, but covertly so, and also in a trancelike state, but not out of sheer bliss as ours, but out of a sense of divine mission to make the ultimate sacrifice in stealing the dream of innocents in a crowded train or bus or market place.

Which is why, for all its shortcomings and with all our problems as a people, Carnival must continue to be what it is — a moment of human camaraderie at its finest in this world here and now, even as others, for achieving just the opposite, see their salvation only in the next.

Dr Errol Benjamin ebenjami522@hotmail.

com

The moot is similar to a mock trial, but the students present their cases to the judges in the absence of a jury and other elements of a real-life trial.

Friday’s session pitted legal teams from the University of the West Indies Mona campus against students from the St Augustine campus; a team from the University of Guyana against one from the University of Technology in Jamaica; another from the Hugh Wooding Law School arguing against a team from the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill; and a team from the Eugene Dupuch Law School in The Bahamas against one from the Norman Manley Law School in Jamaica.

Byron regretted that he could not announce that more Caricom states had abandoned the Privy Council in favour of joining the CCJ in its appellate jurisdiction as the final court of appeal of the region. He said the number of countries which had so far adopted the CCJ as their final court of appeal remains four: Barbados, Belize, Dominica and Guyana.

In fact, he said a referendum last November in Grenada on that island’s joining the court ended in a loss by about 3,000 votes out of 23,177, and while those who did not support the court interpreted this as a “rebuff ” to the CCJ, and more “evidence” of its unfitness to replace the Privy Council, the CCJ did not see it in the same way, interpreting the outcome of the referendum as an incitement to work harder to make the court more attractive to the Caribbean region.

“We understand that the most effective way to neutralise that is through good performance. We understand that only by demonstrating what we are worth — and that we are worth a great deal — that we will woo a majority of support to our side.”

In a statement, the ECA said that in the short term, such a decision may address the issue of poor turnout at schools but it questions the long term implications this will have on the children’s psyche.

“Already, the worrying loss of productivity in our workplaces (of which our schools are not exempt), due to the Carnival “holidays” seems to get going a full week before Carnival, kicking off with various marquee fetes and ending with “Fantastic Friday”.

The productivity of our student and teacher population is severely compromised with a mixture of tired and sleep-deprived individuals whose concentration can hardly be thought of as optimum,” the ECA stated.

The Association added that “as students transition into the world of work, this sort of conditioning for a “Carnival holiday” during the actual week of Carnival is not in the best interest of the productive workforce we hope to cultivate.” The ECA said it fears that it will only perpetuate its current concerns surrounding high absenteeism and declining productivity in the country.

Education Minister Anthony Garcia has said he will hold consultations with stakeholders on the issue. The Association applauds the initiative but said it should be done holistically.

“Research strongly suggests that children learn what they live.

“Let us therefore address the problem of absenteeism from our nation’s schools at Carnival time in a holistic, collective fashion, rather than seeking to fix the fundamental issues in a piecemeal way.

“To do otherwise may result in the development of various levels of undesirable tendencies, which we would have to face and attempt to conquer later down the road…in our communities and workplaces as after all, we are largely driven by habit,” the ECA stated.