Lecturers and teachers book/research allowances

I have been listening to the debate on lecturers and teachers book/research allowances with profound interest. Much as I believe in research and the concept of book allowances etc, I will be very quick to question the reason for giving these allowances out and also to find out whether there are procedures in place to monitor whether or not these allowances were used for the purposes for which there were given out. The obvious answer is no. Since my years in primary, secondary and university, I have never seen any lecturer/teachers using books that were not from the University Library or school library. Neither I have I heard about any ground breaking research from any of our institution as a result of these allowances being dish out to our teachers. I do not for once think that these lecturers and teachers are crying over this allowance for the love of research or reading/learning new things in order to impact the so called knowledge onto our sons, daughters, brothers and sisters. The main reason for the objections was the fact that these allowances form part of their salary and not necessarily for the so called research. Have we forgotten those days when our teachers failed to cover the syllabus in class because they wanted to do extra classes in order to line their pockets? Think about that.

Let’s sample 100 teachers at random who have benefited from the so called research/book allowance in the past and find out about the type of research they have undertaken in the recent past and also the number of books they have bought and read to date. I do not think you will find 5% of them. In the university, lecturers and teachers fight over text books from the university library. During our time in the university there were barely any useful books in the library for the course we were studying. We find it so difficult trying to make the best of virtually nothing. Our lecturers have no modern books to teach from (even though they were collecting these allowances), they were using 100years old lecture notes to teach us even though so much have changed in the world in which we are being prepared to compete.

In the universities there are also what we called equipment allowances. Has any government cared to go and audit the number of equipments the various departments in our university have acquired since the inception of this allowance also? Can all the various departments in our universities say confidently that they have used these allowances for the right purpose? The answer is no. Let's also ask ourselves what advances have been made in alleviating even malaria in our dear nation. Our doctors/lecturers are not seeking any new knowledge, their research interest is in their standard of living and how to organise strike actions. I have not heard of any breakthroughs in academia either so why waste our money on the so called research allowances?

It is as a result of the problems enumerated above that I firmly support the government in coming out with the new arrangement for research and book allowances. But the government must put in place proper protocol in disbursing these allowances. For example before a research allowance is given to a teacher or a lecturer, a panel needs to sit and discuss the research proposal to determine whether it is relevant to our current developmental needs. If not, it should be rejected outright. Secondly instead of giving book allowances to individual teachers, the government should rather buy these books and deposit them in teachers library in every school/university so that other teachers would benefit from the use of these books also. What we must avoid is giving the moneys direct to teachers/lecturers because they will not use it for the intended purposes. The truth is hard to swallow but this is my opinion.

I am just an ordinary citizen of Ghana; I am not a party representative of any party so please refrain from discussing any party politics here. We are talking about moneys being wasted and we need better solution to reduce the amount of waste and corruption in our public institutions.

Author

Adumoa Sam

Lincolnshire Midlands