UNNECESSARY THREAT

IF what is reported to have transpired at a press conference in Accra last Thursday is true, then we are really in bad times as far as teaching and learning in our schools are concerned.
As reported in sections of the print media, the Greater Accra Regional Chairman of the National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT), Mr Eric Angel Cabonu, threatened at the said press conference that the members of the association were prepared to teach students the wrong things if the government continued to pay no attention to their salary demands.
“What meaningful life does one expect a teacher on low salary to lead in order to have the peace of mind to teach and train the future leaders of its country?” he was reported to have asked.
It is common knowledge among the populace that the conditions under which teachers in the country work are, to say the least, very bad. Apart from low salaries, there are no incentive regimes and accommodation facilities are not the best. In some places, there is no accommodation and the teacher who earns low income is forced to pay exorbitant rent to landlords and land-ladies. But, as Mr Cabonu put it, “Teachers, like other Ghanaian workers, naturally react to the economic realities of society which force the teacher to embark on industrial actions.”
Given this stark reality of the teacher’s poor remuneration vis-à-vis the economic realities of the day, it is normal for teachers to fight for a just share of the national cake. This, indeed, they have been doing at regular intervals, the biggest and longest strike taking place in 2006.
That strike paralysed the running of schools all over the country until a court order compelled teachers to return to the classrooms. However, before that, the Ghana Education Service had withheld the October 2006 salaries of most NAGRAT members and those of other teachers who were not members of the association.
The argument put up by the GES for that line of action was that since the striking teachers did not render any services that month, they did not merit any payment.
If the DAILY GRAPHIC recalls, there was a promise to pay the teachers their October 2006 salaries as a mark of good faith, since the teachers had respected the court order to return to the classrooms. However, it is over a year now since that promise and yet the teachers have not received their October 2006 salaries. It is this which has exercised our teachers to issue threats of strikes and the teaching of the wrong things in the classrooms.
While pleading with NAGRAT to consider the ramifications of its intended actions, especially against the backdrop that its 2006 strike had a debilitating effect on the results of candidates who wrote the West Africa Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE), the DAILY GRAPHIC would also appeal to the government to give a hearing to the pleas of teachers in general and do something about their conditions of service.
We believe that the Fair Wages Commission which is supposed to look at the salaries of all categories of workers has remained too long on the drawing board. That has led to the situation where every worker is talking about salaries and how they should be adjusted upwards to reflect economic realities on the ground.
The bottomline, however, is that all of us must collectively resolve to work harder to create more wealth so that we can share it equitably. Until we do that, we will lack the moral courage to ask for more salary when productivity is low.