Secret behind WASSCE failures uncovered, govt caught pants down

The recent abysmal performance of SHS students who took part in the WASSCE has been very worrisome to many Ghanaians. The Minister for Education, the Director General for Ghana Education Service, the Asantehene, and other stakeholders have expressed their displeasure and have called for interventions to salvage the situation. However, the situation is just a beginning of a crisis that is yet to escalate in the first and second cycle education in Ghana.

Firstly, teachers who are to nurture the students and render high standard and quality tuition are mostly not psychologically sound for the task. About 60,000 teachers are having some sort of problem with their salaries. Some have salaries in arrears, others are having upgrading problem, whilst about 15,000 are yet to be paid their salaries (they have never been paid before since they started working).

Can these teachers be in the right state of mind to deliver quality services to our wards? How can the teacher who goes to class with an empty stomach teach our children to pass? Can this level of teacher motivation management lead us to our mission of improving upon the education standard in the country?

It is very pathetic to see professional teachers wallowing in huge debt in order to survive these hard times. It seems like a miracle, imagining how people could be meeting these high utility bills, high cost of transportation, and an overall high cost of living. But the truth is, the victim teachers are suffering, they have become irresponsible in their homes, they are hungry, they are disappointed and they are highly mentally unstable.

With these serious challenges, it is impossible to improve upon the extremely low performance of 72% failures recorded this year. The education standard is expected to further deteriorate under these conditions and the 2015 WASSCE results are projected to further worsen to 78% failures if the government does not show commitment in solving the situation.

Is it the case that the government does not care about our children? or the authorities are simply not ready to get its teachers out of starvation? The ‘Hungry Teachers’ are simply calling on the government to start paying them their monthly salaries. Working for about two years without salary is inhumane, unacceptable, and highly suicidal.

As Mr Abanga puts it “we are desperately pleading that they just start paying our monthly allowance and leave the arrears for future processing...we are unable to carry on again because of the hard times Ghana is facing”. All efforts by Abanga and other colleagues to get their salaries have proven futile. The government seems to have turned a death ear to the demands of these hungry teachers. It seems the authorities have put them on “death row’ and delightfully staring at their ‘untimely death’.

One is tempted to wonder if the government intends to deliberately starve these teachers to death. Why would the GES employ people, give them appointment letters, state the day they should start work and their respective salaries and still refuse to pay them for two years.

Even the slaves who were transported from Africa to the America(s) during the industrial revolution were being motivated for their hard works; and also as a mechanism to urge them to improve upon performance. If these people whose actions have been described as inhumane and treacherous were rewarding their subjects for work done, how much more a democratic government of a nation.

It is rather unfortunate that the government of Ghana doesn’t see the essence in paying teachers the salaries that are due them. As John Dewey puts it “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself”. Refusing to motivate teachers to give out the best education to our children is simply denying them their right to live.

Details on the names and statistics of the unpaid teachers can be located at GES, Accra and other regional offices of GES.

hungryteachers@yahoo.com