Deputy Ranking Member on Parliament’s Education Committee and MP for Builsa South Constituency, Dr. Clement Abas Apaak has opined that some of the ongoing strikes in the Education sector, specifically strikes in the pre-tertiary sector, could have been avoided.

At the moment, three Teacher Unions at the pre-tertiary levels namely, the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT) and the Coalition of Concerned Teachers-Ghana, have embarked on an industrial strike action to protest the appointment of Dr. Eric Nkansah as Director-General of the Ghana Education Service (GES).

Dr. Apaak who was making a submission on the ongoing strikes, claimed that the strikes in the pre-tertiary sector were not premised on seemingly unresolvable issues like conditions of service and remunerations and so Government should have responded to the demands of the striking bodies to prevent the strikes.

“I believe that this matter can be resolved very quickly because their strike is not based on conditions of service by and large; it is not precipitated by any other factor, but it is precipitated primarily with their disagreement and opposition to the appointment of Dr. Eric Nkansah to serve as the Director General of the Ghana Education Service which they reject too. And I believe they have proffered very reasonable arguments to justify their decision to oppose that appointment.”
Dr. Clement Apaak, MP

The Deputy Ranking Member on the Education Committee, bemoaned the fact that schooling has been put on a halt and at the moment, millions of children of school going ages are at home just because Government is unwilling to rescind its decision on Dr. Nkansah’s appointment.

“I cannot see why 400,000 teachers have to leave classroom to the detriment of over 8million students and pupils because of one appointment that has been made which the teacher unions deem to be unacceptable as far as their standards are concerned.”
Dr. Clement Apaak, MP

According to him, the appointing authority, i.e. the President who appointed Dr. Nkansah upon the recommendation of the Education Minister, must just make “a simple pronouncement” that Dr. Nkansah’s appointment has been revoked and a new Director-General who has the credentials the striking bodies want has been appointed for the strikes to be called off.

The Builsa South MP found it fascinating that schooling at the pre-tertiary levels has come to a standstill because, Government has failed to listen to the Teacher Unions who are demanding for the appointment of someone who has years of experience in teaching as head of GES.

He noted that even though the Constitution vests in the President the sole power to appoint public officials like the Director-General of GES, the President must do due diligence before making any such appointments. He claimed that if the necessary consultations and background checks were done, the ongoing strikes wouldn’t have happened in the first place.

“Yes the argument has been made that there is no law and that perhaps, you know, nobody has the power to challenge the President’s authority in appointing, well and good.

“But when you are functioning within the space of stakeholders, where you know that there are elements within the space who also have interest, who are professionals, one of the things you ought to do is to always do some background diligent work to ensure that whomever you’re going to bring on board is generally acceptable to principal those who are in the middle of that theatre, and this is the about 400,000 teachers. That was not done.”
Dr Clement Apaak, MP

Other Imminent Strikes in the Education Sector

Meanwhile, the Colleges of Education Teachers Association of Ghana (CETAG) and the Colleges of Education Non-Teaching Staff Association of Ghana (CENTSAG), the two major associations in Ghana’s 46 Colleges of Education have threatened to embark on an industrial strike action starting from Friday, 11th November, 2022, in protest of poor conditions of service.

Amongst other things, CETAG and CENTSAG are asking the Ministry of Education to pay compensations owed them. They are also calling on Government to expedite work towards putting First degree CENTSAG members on 17H on the SSSS from April, 2023 which was the agreed time determined by the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission (FWSC) to include graduate CENTSAG members on the salary structure.

The Unions in Colleges of Education are also asking for the finalisation of Conditions of Service (CoS) negotiations which began on August 14, 2022. They also claimed there were variations in their fuel, vehicle maintenance, and off-campus allowances when compared to that of other analogous institutions. And so that should be resolved as well.

Mr. Prince Obeng-Himang, President of CETAG speaking on the Union’s intended strike claimed that his Union and their sister Union, CENTSAG have been maligned and cheated by Government for far too long and that’s why the strike has become necessary.

“The members who are working in the colleges are one of the few people who have been cheated, slighted for far too long. The genesis has been the fact that when we even had our negotiation in 2017, it took us up to 2021 before we threatened, we went on strike before Government decided to give us some kind of compensation for failure to pay what we negotiated for in 2017.

“It means that we had remained without any form of condition of service from that time up till 2021. Now eventually when that compensation was given us, the MOU or the agreement we had was that we were going to quickly negotiate for 2022 conditions of service and we started in August 2021.

“The anticipation was that we would have finished by December 2021 so that it will take effect in 2022 January. Indeed we can say that we are still around the negotiation table from that time up to this time, talk about the resources we’ve pumped into it, and we still haven’t been able to finish.”
Mr. Prince Obeng Himang, President CETAG