It is a bad move to hire more teachers at this time – Apaak to GTEC

Dr Clement Apaak, Deputy Ranking Member of Parliament’s Education Committee, has criticized the decision of the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC) to hire 2,500 new teachers for the colleges of education.

In a press release signed by the Acting Director General, Prof Ahmed Jinapor Abdulai, on Friday, August 16, 2024, GTEC said the new teachers were to fill the vacancies created by the striking members of the Colleges of Education Teachers Association of Ghana (CETAG).

However, according to Dr Apaak, this is the wrong move to solve the months-long impasse.

He said the government should negotiate with CETAG to return to the classrooms instead.

“I think that this move is a very bad move, it ought to be withdrawn. Government must shower the needed resources to meet its obligation to the teachers and let them go back and teach,” he said.

He added that there is no budgetary allocation for employing the 2,500 teachers and the process cannot be done soon enough to fill the void.

“We know that we passed the 2024 budget, we have also seen the minister for Finance come with the Mid-year review budget, there are no allocations or estimations to cater for the recruitment of 2500 lecturers. This can not happen within the next two to three months. I can tell you that on authority.

“I am a lecturer. I have gone through the processes. The process itself of recruiting lecturers, is not something you can do within two weeks or even a month. Clearly, it is not feasible,” Dr Apaak stressed.

Meanwhile, GTEC in its statement assured that once a clearance of funds is granted, it will swiftly communicate the recruitment process to ensure the timely deployment of the new staff.

“The Commission is in serious talks with the Honourable Minister of Education for financial clearance to be granted to GTEC to recruit some two thousand five hundred (2500) teaching staff to augment the current load for academic work to commence as quickly as possible while we work with CETAG to resolve their concerns,” the statement read.

Also, the Commission revealed that it had paid top-up of the research allowance for 44 of the 46 Colleges of Education, except for McCoy and Dambai, which have some technical issues to be resolved.