Last Friday, September 25, the three pre-tertiary teacher unions — the Ghana National Association of Teachers, the National Association of Graduate Teachers and the Coalition of Concerned Teachers, Ghana — declared a nationwide industrial action.
The reasons they gave are familiar, painful and legitimate.
The existing Collective Agreement has expired.
Negotiations for a new one that should have been completed by June 2026 remain outstanding.
Newly promoted teachers have not been placed on their appropriate salary scales.
Arrears have not been paid.
And the 20 per cent deprived area allowance has not been implemented.
The Government’s failure to resolve these issues by the midday deadline of September 24 triggered the strike.
The unions said the decision followed prolonged delays, unfulfilled commitments and growing frustration. That frustration is understandable.
No worker should be promoted and remain on the old salary.
No worker should wait months for arrears that are due.
No teacher who accepts posting to the most difficult, rural, deprived communities should be denied the allowance that was promised to compensate for that sacrifice.
But neither should the Ghanaian child be made to stay home indefinitely while the matters are being resolved.
That is why yesterday’s intervention by the Minister of Education, Haruna Iddrisu, matters, and why the Daily Graphic calls on the teacher unions to consider calling off the strike while negotiations continue.
Meeting the unions in Accra yesterday, Monday, September 29, the minister set out what government says it will do.
The Fair Wages and Salaries Commission will meet the unions to continue negotiations on the collective agreement and conditions of service.
On the critical issue of the 20 per cent rural deprived allowance, government has constituted a validation committee to be chaired by the Minister of Employment and Labour to validate data on its implementation.
The Government’s commitment, the minister said, was to roll out the allowance effective January 2027, subject to validation of the data and a defined roadmap on which the teacher unions would be adequately represented.
We know the unions don’t trust government and we understand that scepticism.
Teachers have heard many promises over the years.
Trust is low because delivery has been slow. But this is precisely why a validation committee with union representation and a clear timeline to October for promotions, and January for the allowance is a better path than an indefinite strike.
We must ask: who suffers most when schools are closed?
It is not the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission. It is not the Controller.
It is the child in Sissala, in Kintampo, in Afram Plains, whose only hope for social mobility is the classroom.
It is the final-year student preparing for WASSCE.
It is the parent who must now find a way to keep children at home.
Industrial action is a legitimate tool.
The 1992 Constitution protects it.
But it is also a tool that must be used with proportionality, especially in an essential service like education.
The government, for its part, must learn from this cycle.
We cannot have a situation where a collective agreement expires in June and by September negotiations have still not concluded.
We cannot have 80,000 promoted teachers waiting months to be placed on the right scale.
That is administrative failure. It breeds anger.
It makes strikes inevitable.
The GES must modernise its data management.
How is it that in 2026, we still struggle to input promotion data for teachers on the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Database?
How is it that validation of who qualifies for deprived area allowance still requires calling officers from regions to Accra for emergency data entry? Digitisation must be more than a slogan.
The Controller and Accountant General must also treat teachers' arrears with the urgency they deserve.
Yet, even as we demand better from government, we appeal to the unions.
Your concerns are legitimate.
Government has now given dates — today for collective agreement negotiations, October 6 for promotion data completion, end of October for payment on new grades, January 2027 for deprived allowance.
Hold government to those dates.
A strike that drags on will only harden positions and further erode public sympathy.
Teachers in deprived areas are the backbone of equity in our education system.
They deserve more than allowance — they deserve respect.
In the end, this dispute is not government versus teachers.
It is about whether Ghana values its teachers enough to pay them on time, and whether teachers, even when aggrieved, value Ghanaian children enough not to keep them out of school longer than necessary.
Both can be true. Let negotiations continue.
Let the classrooms reopen.
