National President of the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), Prosper Tachie, has disclosed that even among the 6,079 teachers CAGD claims to have processed and paid, many have not actually received their promotion arrears, deepening the union’s frustration over the handling of the promotion placement exercise.
Speaking on an interview, Mr Tachie gave a detailed account of the delays that led to the industrial action, explaining that the union’s grievance covers more than 80,000 teachers who were successful in promotion examinations, a figure significantly higher than the 58,620-master list the Controller and Accountant-General’s Department (CAGD) has been working with.
Mr Tachie explained that when teachers promoted at different ranks are added together, the total comes to over 80,000 and said it appeared the Controller and Accountant-General’s Department had prepared only for the 58,000 figure without accounting for those on lower ranks.
He argued that education remains the largest sector within Ghana’s public service, noting that nearly half of all public sector workers paid from the Consolidated Fund fall within the education sector.
He said this scale should prompt reflection on whether government is genuinely interested in the services teachers deliver, and not merely in tracking numbers.
Delayed Examination and A Presidential Intervention
Mr Tachie recounted that teachers were compelled to sit promotion examinations in December last year, after government gave clearance through the Ministry of Finance, warning that failure to do so could affect the following year’s budget allocations.
He said members sat the exams while others celebrated the Christmas festivities, with a further batch examination in February.
Although results were expected by March, they were delayed until President John Dramani Mahama raised the matter himself ahead of a visit to commission a project at the Sweden Ghana Medical Centre.
Mr Tachie said the President’s intervention, which highlighted the effect of the delay on teachers nearing retirement, led to an instruction for the results to be released.
According to Mr Tachie, the established practice after such results are released is for the CAGD to work with the Ghana Education Service (GES) to place successful teachers on their new salary scales.
However, he said the Controller issued new modalities for placing workers onto the payroll platform that GES was expected to communicate to teachers, a process he stopped short of describing as negligence.
Broken Promises on Placement
He said May passed without placements being made, June brought no progress, and by July, an unspecified development occurred that further stalled the process.
Frustrated, the unions rejected further verbal assurances and demanded a written commitment. GES then indicated that promotion letters would be issued by 15 August, with placements completed by the end of that month.
“We were not ready for any verbal promise again.”
Prosper Tachie
That commitment was also not honored, prompting anger among the unions until the Minister of Education intervened personally, leading to the meeting of 31 August 2026 involving the Minister, the CAGD, GES and the unions.
Mr Tachie said the understanding reached was that all teachers who passed the promotion examinations would be placed on their appropriate ranks.
However, he alleged that GES subsequently engaged regional and district directors directly, requesting fresh data, including pay slips, from teachers to input into the system, a move he said departed from what had been agreed.
“That was not what we agreed. The agreement was that all teachers who were successful would be placed on the requisite appropriate rank.”
Prosper Tachie
He said the unions waited through this validation process, only to later learn that out of the more than 80,000 teachers expected, just over 6,000 had been placed on scale.
Arrears Still Missing for Some
Mr Tachie further disclosed that even among those placed on scale, many did not receive their arrears despite the directive that payments should be backdated to January.
He explained that some teachers had their arrears validated and were expecting the money to reflect in their accounts, but this did not happen for a number of them.
He said this unresolved gap is part of why the latest round of promises from the Ministry has failed to satisfy the unions, setting the stage for the continued standoff and the meeting held at the Ministry of Education.
With discrepancies between the union’s figures and those provided by CAGD, and with arrears still outstanding for some already “placed” teachers, the dispute is likely to require further reconciliation of data between GES, CAGD and the unions before a lasting resolution can be reached.
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