KNUST TEWU protest exclusion of rep from Governing Council

Members of the Teachers and Education Workers Union (TEWU) on Friday gave the Governing Council of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) headache when they protested their exclusion from their inclusion on the Council.

With members of the Council meeting for the last time to wind up their activities for 2019, scores of members of the union besieged the main administration block of the university to demand the inclusion of their representative,  Mr Charles Arthur.

Mr Arthur’s name was removed from the list of Council members sworn into office in November 2019.

The aggrieved group accused the Minister of Education, Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh, of being the masterminded the removal of their representative on the Council.

According to TEWU, they nominated Mr Arthur and communicated their decision in a letter dated September 5, 2019. But for some reasons unknown, he was not included on the Council, which had a meeting on Friday.

After a back and forth for several hours, the Vice-Chancellor of KNUST, Prof Obiri Danso, requested an official petition to have the issue addressed after meeting with leaders of TEWU.

“This is beyond me. Your leaders have agreed to submit an official letter. We will follow up to a reasonable conclusion,” he told members of the group.

Meanwhile, the Committee of Local Union Executive (CULUE) of TEWU, from the country’s 10 public universities, have thrown their weight behind the decision to have Mr Arthur inducted.

Welcoming the decision, spokesperson of CULUE, Agana Caesar, emphasised the importance of accepting their representative. He urged the Education Minister “to stop interfering in the university’s administration”.

He explained that “by the next Council meeting [if] we don’t hear anything positive then we will advise ourselves appropriately, across all the 10 public universities in Ghana”.