Education and Management Expert, Nii Armah Addy has said that while unfortunate, students and their parents or guardians would have to continue to bear the brunt of the ongoing strike.
Mr. Addy, speaking on A1 Radio’s Day Break Upper East, opined that so far as schools continue to remain open and the relevant stakeholders required to end the strike by UTAG fail to do so, parents and students would have to spend meagre resources in school doing nothing.
He continued to say that while he understands that the situation is not a favourable one for the students, he also understands the difficult decision the lecturers have had to make in their attempt to better their Conditions of Service (CoS). Mr. Addy was against the closure of the schools saying “if we close down, then the speed at which we will be used to resolve the issue would be a little more relaxed. But if they are there and pressure is mounting, then that will compel either government or UTAG to come to an agreement”.
“If you say the lecturers should go [back to school] then you are saying they should be denied what is due them. If you are saying they should not go, then you are also saying that you do not care about what we are missing in our education,” he said.
Mr. Addy explained that the extended strike action could spell further doom for the already frail tertiary academic calendar.
Meanwhile, Austin Gameh, a Labour Expert has suggested that both the University Teachers Association of Ghana (UTAG) and the National Labour Commission (NLC) have failed in their attempts to resolve the current debacle and as such, have compounded the issues at hand.
As such, Mr. Gameh has proposed that a third party, who is truly independent and agreeable to all parties involved, should be involved to help in the mediation of the impasse. Should this fail to happen, the strike action could persist longer while the substantive matter to be resolved would be dragged for a very long time.
UTAG has also said it is disappointed in the current injunction granted by the court against its strike. This is after the National Labour Commission (NLC) prayed the court to direct the lecturers to go back to the classrooms.
A1radioonline.com|101.1MHz|Mark Kwasi Ahumah Smith|Ghana
