Ghana Education Service enough!

Let me tell you about a free advice one education officer gave me. It was somewhere in 2015 and I was in my first year in a college of education. He was what was then called a Circuit Supervisor (CS). They are now what we call SchoolImprovement Support Officers (SISO). A team of us were doing an observation service in one of Kasoa’s biggest public and basic schools when he arrived on a routine school visit. He was told we had come and asked to have a familiarization meeting with us. And to share a word.

And his word was: Do not remain in the teaching job for life in Ghana if you want to make it as a man.

Women, he exempted, were better off being teachers because it would offer them time for their families.

My mother was not a teacher, but she also held teaching to be women friendly because of the time and tide it affords.

Let’s imagine my mother and the School Improvement Support Officer are being honest. At least they are.

It has been seven nostalgic years and I still remember that School Improvement Support Officer.

Why?
A friend of mine recently mentioned to me in a WhatsApp conversation that although schools are on vacation, she cannot afford the cost of transportation from Western Region to Accra.

Her reason?
She is a teacher. And she has not been paid salary since January when she was posted. We are now in August and I guess you get the whole point.

Last month, another male teacher with a similar situation prompted me that he would be needing support for the break, else, he would starve.

He too has not been paid. From January to August.

I could go on and on and on but I guess the plight of these two start-up teachers could drive home my point.

Over the years, the Ghana Education Service has notoriously delayed the salary of baby teachers for God knows how many months after their deployment in most cases, to very remote corners of the country, far away from the comfort of one’s home.

The EXCUSE given for such delays is that those new recruits have to undergo a series of documentation, biometric and print.

And thanks to that, they have to beg family and friends for sustenance. Or borrow from mobile money.

But how bad is too bad?
It takes twenty-four to seventy-two hours to count ballot papers of a nation of about thirty million after an election and thirty to sixty days to go house-to-house and count the same population during population and housing census.

Ghana Education Service, why can’t you do same?

Ghana Education Service, learn from the Electoral Commission.

Ghana Education Service, learn from the Ghana Statistical Service.

Ghana Education Service, enough!
A friend who also began his teaching career last January in the Central Region has told me he is still waiting to undergo his biometric registration and until then, he cannot be paid.

Remember we are in August.
Let’s face the fact. The number being worked on is only 16000 new teachers.

They say a first impression is always a lasting impression. When teachers are welcomed into the profession with almost a year of hardship, what lasting impression are they given?

While they starve and borrow money to be able to live to teach, it is also unreasonably expected of them to improvise Teaching and Learning Material which are always lacking. Some teacher workshops, including those organized by the National Teaching Council, charge 70 or 80 cedis per diem from teachers because, ‘if they don’t attend the workshop, they will not be promoted and have their license renewed.

And teachers rush to avoid the NTC’s confrontation.

In 2018, the Ministry of Education rolled out a package of reforms, including a new curriculum. Everything was to begin with the next batch of candidates. But teacher trainees who had passed all exams, completed a year of internship were home waiting for the trumpet of recruitment to blow when boom! The goal post was shifted. They would have to return to their respective colleges and write a license examination. After much agitation, like the word of God, it came to pass. The pass rate was alright and they expected now to be posted. Then, it was followed by a second blow. Everyone would undergo national service for the time being and be posted the next year.

In 2019 the first begrudged trainees completed their services. The Ministry of Education honoured its words and recruited them. But it took six months for any money to hit their account. Within that period, I remember I had to float in between GES offices delivering this document or signing that. I would meet with my friends or talk and text them on WhatsApp and our conversation would always centre on one theme. Hardships. Exam Labs

When the two newly posted teachers shared their plights with me, it reminded me of my days as a newly posted teacher in January 2020. I worked from January to March without a salary because, like the newly posted today, I had to undergo a series of registration.

Do not get me wrong but I was relieved and thankful when Covid struck the world and schools were closed. I could wake up in the morning without thinking about where to get money for my transportation to my school to teach.

Two and a half years now and I imagine life without salary in THIS Ghana. Ukraine needs the world. Our government needs IMF, E-levy, 20-something percent increment in utility tariffs and many others in order to survive.

I nearly forgot to add; President Nana Addo Dankwa Akuffo Addo has said nobody becomes a millionaire or a whatever-naire as a teacher.

It does not matter whether that is true or not or whether it was wise to say it or otherwise. The way you see the world depends on where you are standing so the way you see what the president shouldn’t have said, brutally, may depend on where you stand on honest brutality.

A Nigerian writer once said on BBC, ‘To love your country, your country must love you back’.

I say, ‘To love your profession, your profession must love you back’.

When my friends told me they are starving by the grace of eight months of unpaid salary and the GES’s registration regime and paperwork in a supposedly paperless era, the advice I was given at the beginning of my journey as a teacher started playing back like a record.

My name is Ceelala Lalasi, and I am pleading with the GES for my friends to get paid before they starve to death.

Ceelala Lalasi (Paa Kwesi Arko Cee) is an award-winning fiction writer and columnist and a teacher from Ghana. He holds both a Diploma in Education and a Bachelor of Education from the University of Cape Coast. He is the author of University of Hard Knocks which won the Ghana Writers Award in 2017, Rwanda Can Never Be My Home, The Street Sweeper, Koforidua Flowers…Ceelala was longlisted for the African Writers Award 2018…