A member of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) communications team, Kemi Musah, has defended teachers currently on strike, saying they are within their rights to demand promotions and arrears the government has yet to pay.
Speaking on the industrial action by pre-tertiary teacher unions, Musah said teachers live under the same economic conditions as other Ghanaians and should not be treated as outsiders when they press for what is due them.
“Every economic hardship that we face as a people, teachers are also part of it,” she said.
“This increment in fees that came about a couple of days ago, they are also subjected to the same. So why do we speak of them as if they are their own Pluto or Mars? They live here with us. They go through the same things we go through.”
She argued that the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC) is facing pressure because of the scale of commitments made before and after the 2024 elections.
“Sometimes the reason why this government faces the heat it faces is because of the truckload of promises it made to certain groups of people,” Musah said. “And it’s only natural that when you go and promise certain things, they expect that you deliver.”
Teachers, she added, are “an integral part of our society,” and commentary that treats them as separate from the rest of the country is unfair. “They are in their right to ask for what is due them. All they are saying is, promote teachers — this was supposed to happen earlier this year. Pay arrears.”
Musah also questioned the size of some of the figures under dispute. “Some of them were even saying, how much is the money to even begin with? Some of these increments they are even fighting for is like a hundred series,” she said, suggesting the amounts involved should not be beyond the state’s capacity to settle.
Her remarks come as the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), the National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT) and the Pre-Tertiary Teachers Association of Ghana (PRETAG) remain on a nationwide strike that began on 25 September 2026. The unions cite three main grievances: delays in negotiating a new Collective Agreement after the previous one expired, the failure to place teachers who passed December 2025 and February 2026 promotion examinations on their new salary scales with arrears from January 2026, and the non-implementation of a 20 per cent Deprived Area Allowance for teachers in hard-to-reach communities.
Education Minister Haruna Iddrisu has held talks with the unions and set a 30 October deadline to clear outstanding promotion arrears, while the Controller and Accountant-General’s Department has said some submitted cases have already been processed. The unions have so far refused to call off the strike on the basis of assurances alone, insisting they want concrete payments and documented commitments.
On Joy Prime’s Prime Morning, Musah has also criticised attempts to frame the dispute mainly as a documentation and payroll-validation problem, describing that as a shift away from the substantive issues. She noted that more than 100,000 teachers sat promotion aptitude tests in 2025, with reports that over 80,000 passed, and said placement has since become a protracted process.
Source: Starrfm.com.gh
