Government has described the ongoing strike by Teacher Unions as sabotage after their meeting with the unions ended inconclusively.
Government’s meeting with the teacher unions to resolve the issue of legacy arrears did not end well, the PRO for the Education Ministry, Vincent Ekow Assafuah speaking to Joy FM accused the teachers of deliberately sabotaging them.
“In the absence of substance from the teacher unions then there is sabotage.”
But President of Ghana National Association of Teachers Philippa Larsen has however dismissed the claims by the Education Ministry and stated that they met with the Minister of Employment and Labour Relation but will only return to the classrooms after they are paid.
“There was a meeting but they did not come with anything good so we are still on strike.”
GES to publish legacy arrears beneficiaries
The Ghana Education Service (GES) says it will not be stampeded into paying illegal money to teachers under the guise of legacy arrears.
According to the service, it had saved the government GH¢11.3 million after detecting some anomalies in the payment of the arrears and that there was the need to do more to verify the genuineness of the payments before the affected teachers were paid.
The Director-General of the GES, Prof. Kwasi Opoku-Amankwa, in an interview with the Daily Graphic, said it was unfortunate that with all the effort being made by the government, having paid 95 percent of the affected staff, the teachers still insisted on embarking on the strike.
o prove its case, Prof. Opoku-Amankwa said, the GES would publish the list of its staff who benefited from the legacy arrears.
That, he said, was to clear the air and set the records straight about the government’s commitment to pay the debt.
Labour Commission
Prof. Opoku-Amankwa noted that the GES would take up the issue with the National Labour Commission (NLC), and that if by tomorrow the strike had not been called off, it would take its own internal disciplinary measures against the striking teachers.
He said the legacy arrears, which related to outstanding arrears between 2012 and 2016, affected about 120,232 members of staff of the GES, and that out of that number, more than 95 percent had been paid off.
Source: primenewsghana.com
