ACCRA, Sept. 30 — Almost all public basic and senior high schools remained closed across Ghana on Tuesday as a teachers’ strike continued.
A visit to some schools in the eastern port city of Tema and its environs shows virtually no academic work, as public school teachers have stayed away from their campuses, leaving only a few pupils and students around, with the majority also staying at home. Some students said they had gone to their schools to see if their teachers would turn up for classes after being absent on Monday. According to some final-year students, the development was worrying, as they had a lot of topics to cover ahead of their upcoming external examination early next year. “It is quite disturbing that our teachers are on strike at this crucial moment of our lives. We need them to take us through a lot of topics as well as guide us in approaches to answering examination questions,” said Justina Adu, a final-year student. Juana Boateng, a 41-year-old single mother of three, underlined the strike as “a big issue to some single mothers and workers.” “Before the strike, I would send them to school and go to work, but now I have to leave them with a relative who lives away from us to enable me to go to work and pick them upon my return. This is creating an inconvenience to me,” she said. Three pre-tertiary teacher unions — the Ghana National Association of Teachers, the National Association of Graduate Teachers, and the Pre-Tertiary Teachers Association of Ghana — declared a strike action on Sept. 25 over welfare issues. The teachers are asking for a renegotiation of their expired collective agreement, payment of promotion arrears for some 80,000 teachers, and the implementation of a 20 percent deprived area allowance.
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