“For one to be appointed a minister, one must have a moral thinking. E.T Mensah does not have a moral thinking.”
These words were the assessment of leaders of the Civil and Local Government Staff Association of Ghana (CLOGSAG) on the Minister for Employment and Social Welfare, Enock Teye Mensah, yesterday, after they embarked on a 3-day demonstration in Accra to press home their demand for enhanced wages.
According to the workers, they do not want E.T Mensah or his deputy, Antwi- Boasiako Sekyere to be involved in their on-going negotiations and urged President Mills to replace Mr. Mensah immediately.
They said they would rather negotiate with the Finance and Economic Planning Minister, Dr. Kwabena Duffuor.
The group alleged that before the 2008 elections, the deputy minister in particular had met them on countless occasions and promised to deal with their grievances when his party came to power.
Unfortunately, since the new administration took over, he had reneged on his promises and was now too busy to meet them, they stated.
They stressed that they were not playing politics with their demands as being alleged by the ministers.
“Our pockets are empty. We are neither NPP nor NDC but workers who want our grievances addressed,” they screamed wildly yesterday to the media.
Responding to the action of the aggrieved workers and their claims, Antwi- Boasiako Sekyere said the strike was illegal and government was going to take action to stop it and also put a freeze on their salaries if they did not go back to work.
“If they do not stop, we will have to take some actions against workers who are on strike and indeed it will be against the leadership. If they exhaust all processes and resort to strike, we will let the law take its course…we will sue them for embarking on illegal strike.
If you are a workers’ leader and you ignore the laid-down processes and threaten and carry out strike, should we allow you to continue with impunity? The answer is no.
“We will be taking down the register of those who will be coming to work from tomorrow and do not have any other reason than to assume that they are on strike we will deal with them appropriately because their actions are inimical to the contract of employment of the state…if you do not go to work, do you have the justifications to collect your salary? So we will deal with them,” he told Citi FM yesterday.
It will be recalled that the leadership of CLOGSAG last week accused Mr. Mensah of plotting to ‘shit-bomb’ their members because he suspected they were being sponsored by the New Patriotic Party (NPP).
So angry were the leaders of CLOGSAG that they have accordingly called on their members to embark on daily nationwide demonstrations from Tuesday August 24 to Friday August 27.
“We have been told by the very persons he is plotting with and we are not surprised because that is his stock-in-trade.
We are ready for him and as we said in the press statement, we have bought disinfectants like Detol and ‘akeshaa’ to clean up the place.
He cannot scare us with his shit bomb tactics,” the leadership of CLOGSAG told DAILY GUIDE just after they had addressed a press conference in Accra.
The leaders appeared very agitated as some of them ignored the presence of journalists and rained insults on the gray-haired minister.
The insults were simply unprintable and the actual meanings would be best appreciated in the Ga language which was mostly used.
They had red bands around their heads and wrists as some of them shouted and threw angry fists skyward.
“For now, what we would do is to advise the Minister to undertake courses in labour related issues starting from the Ghana Labour College and may further it at the University of Cape Coast if he so wishes, for him to update his skills in modern trends in labour relations.
This would enable him to build his capacity to administer his office on labour matters and to appropriately advise the President on good governance,” Edward Tennyson Foli, acting president of the association noted.
CLOGSAG members told the media that they were angry because E.T Mensah had described them as a pack of “retired, old-fashioned and blockheaded officers” belonging to an association that “was formed with funding from the New Patriotic Party.”
