The Politics of Deception and the Study Leave Palaver
You can imagine my outrage when in flipping through the pages of the Daily Graphic of Friday March 27 2009, I came across an advertisement placed by the Ghana Education Service titled "GES STUDY LEAVE WITH PAY QUOTA'.
Even without reading further I took my phone and called up a teacher friend of mine to find out whether indeed the advertisement was about giving a quota to the number of teachers who would be allowed to pursue further studies in our tertiary institutions. He answered in the affirmative.
Professor John Evans Atta Mills, the President of the Republic of Ghana, then Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress in the run-up to the December 2008 election slammed the New Patriotic Party government for what he said was 'stifling the progress of teachers'. He said he was against the quota system for teachers going on study leave.
In his professorial wisdom, teachers should be allowed to go on study leave once they express the desire to do so. He therefore promised emphatically that he was going to abolish the quota system for study leave if ever he became President.
Today he is President. The GES has not only put a quota on the number of teachers who can go on study leave, they have also categorised the courses that teachers teach and given some teachers priority over others. 'The quota for award of study leave with pay for this year is three thousand (3000) applicants of the service' the advertisement stated.
Mathematics, Science, English and Information Technology teachers are going to be given priority. Indeed they alone will account for sixty percent (60%) of those who will be granted study leave this year. The rest of the courses will share the rest of the forty percent (40%).
Let me state quickly that I do not disagree with the quota system for teachers wishing to go on study leave. On the contrary, in the run-up to last December's election, we in the NPP disagreed vehemently with Atta Mills when he stated that the quota system stifled the desire of teachers to obtain further education.
We argued that it did not make sense to empty the classrooms in the name of pursuit of further education. We have always thought that as some leave, some should stay to attend to the education of the children until the others return.
But the good old professor swore that it was possible for us to allow any teacher who wanted to go on study leave to do so while still keeping our educational system intact. Indeed the issue of study leave has always been a thorny issue for teachers.
There has always been a back log of teachers wanting to go on study leave. So when the professor swore that he was going to allow all of them to go on study leave even if it meant leaving the classrooms empty, a great number of teachers took the bait.
Today, it has turned out to be another grand deception by the allegedly devout Christian President whose innate desire is to turn Ghana into a prayer camp. For Professor Mills, Christian ethics don"t matter in one's quest for power. After all we students of religion designate universal space into the sacred and the profane.
According to Professor Mills' logic, the field of politics is profane space and therefore it is allowed to use deception in profane space. Then when one goes into the sacred space of the Synagogue Church of All Nations, one can quickly don the garb of religion and ethics.
This is what Blakk Rasta calls a 'sin thing'.
In order to 'double-check' as Malik Kweku Baako will say, I decided to go for the NDC's manifesto to see whether their platform promise on this matter corresponded with their manifesto commitment.
The NDC manifesto has just nine sentences on teachers. Even though I find it suicidal that the NDC should devote only nine sentences to an important aspect of education like teachers, I decided that I will forget 'quantity' and concentrate on 'quality'. Apparently all nine sentences ring hollow.
But the last sentence is what is of interest and the sentence that has a direct relevance to this article.
'Provide access and support to teachers for training and professional development'. (p.71) The NDC was being clever in crafting this sentence.
They took cognisance of the fact that their Presidential Candidate had promised 'unfettered and unhindered access and support to teachers for training and professional development by abolishing the quota system'. Because they knew in their 'heart of hearts' as they say, that Professor Mills' promise was a grand deception, they decided to eliminate the words that will pin them to their promise. 'Unfettered', 'unhindered', 'quota system'.
But they have not been clever after all. 'Provide access and support to teachers for training and professional development' even though it rings hollow, shows an intent by the NDC to deceive which they succeeded in doing. 'Provide access' is ambiguous and deliberately so. First of all to what extent will they go in 'providing access'? One could interpret it either way
For example, now that I have raised the issue, they are going to say they meant that they will increase the quota. Even so, that could have been stated explicitly and to the extent that it was not stated, they cannot convince us that they meant it.
If on the other hand they do not go on the quota 'tangent' to borrow Egbert Faibille's word, then they were merely stating that which was already being done under the NPP administration
This is because under the NPP administration, teachers were going on study leave and that was providing access and for their training and professional development.
I intend to write another article on the politics of deception and religious hypocrisy. Frankly I have never been deceived by the veneer of religiosity that some politicians display in order to hood wink voters. Karl Marx said of religion that it is the 'sigh of the oppressed creature'.
Professor Atta Mills recognised this perfectly and acted out a certain fake religiosity that some how elicited the sympathy of a large segment of the Christian community. Because Jesus Christ warned that not all those who say Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven, some of us have never been deceived by the shouts of Lord! Lord!!
Now that teachers know for sure that they were hood winked into voting for Professor Mills, we shall see what compensation package he will have for them in lieu of the deception. Indeed the entire NDC manifesto was one grand deception.
We shall begin 'subjecting it to critical analysis' as Malik Kweku Baako will say. By the time we are done with tearing it into shreds, it will be obvious to the Ghanaian people that we are indeed in for a rough ride in the next four years.
When we say that the NDC by institutionalising the concept of Propaganda Secretary, display a commitment to deception, their apologists tell us that propaganda does not necessarily mean deception. Well, we shall in another article lay bare the nuances of propaganda. For now it will suffice to mention Sheryl Tuttle Ross. She proffers what she calls the Epistemic Merit Model of propaganda.
This model states that an important characteristic of propaganda is that its message has a flawed epistemology. According to her, 'we can say that a message is epistemically defective if either it is false, inappropriate, or connected to other beliefs that are inapt, misleading, or unwarranted'.
For now I leave readers to judge for themselves whether 'provide access and support to teachers for training and professional development' is epistemically defective or not. As the late Ferdinand Ayim used to say, 'I shall return'.
Source: The Statesman
