TEACHERS WANT GES BOSS ARRESTED

Posted on: www.dailyguideghana.com

By William Yaw Owusu

Thursday, February 25, 2016

A group of teachers whose salaries have delayed has called for the immediate arrest of the Director-General of the Ghana Education Service (GES) Jacob Kor for allegedly overseeing the recruitment of over 400 teachers with fake certificates.

The affected teachers said in a news release yesterday that they were responding to ‘derailing’ statement made by the GES boss on salary arrears that is threatening the labour front in the education sector.

 “Before we begin, we are calling for the immediate arrest of the Director General for recruiting teachers with fake certificates, and going ahead to confirm and upgrade them whilst he knows they are having fake certificates. Other than that we are demanding an unqualified apology from him for fabricating lies.”

Audit Service Query

They argued that the fact that the Ghana Audit Service had raised queries regarding the input forms for teachers showed clearly that the District Directors of the GES were not doing their work properly.

“We are saying that the various District Directors were either sleeping or were under a spell when they accepted and forwarded input forms to the office of the Director-General without certificates,” the group said, adding that “it makes no sense and raises doubts about their qualification and competence.

“We all submitted our certificates since we were made to understand that it was a requisite for claiming the arrears. Isn’t it surprising that forms which were subjected to scrutiny at the district levels before it was forwarded have to be rejected and the rejection notice only made known to us in two years’ time and even more than that in some cases?”

Non-Establishment of warrant

They said the issue of non-establishment of warrant, as claimed by the Director General, was a ploy by GES and the Ministry of Education “to use ambiguous terms with the intent to deceive the public,” saying “even if we take it as they may want to mean, it still makes mockery of the whole GES directorate since it is incumbent on them to issue or establish such warrants.”

“Apart from that, whether warrant or no warrant, the Director-General himself approved our appointments with the Finance Minister giving us clearance before some of us received our three months arrears.”

The group said they were surprised when the GES and the ministry claimed the ‘Assumption of Duty Letters’ and ‘Acceptance Letters’ had not been attached to their documents, insisting “it is the simplest document to obtain among the rest of the documents we were required to submit for approval.

“It is however unclear and quite suspicious if a teacher who has been confirmed and upgraded by GES would not have such documents. On the contrary, we teachers submitted only documents the GES directors requested for.”

They said claims by the Director General that all the rejected forms were sent back to the district offices through the regional directorate was untrue and challenged him to provide concrete evidence to that effect.

“Looking at the way the GES and Ministries of Education, as well as Finance, are contradicting each other, you don’t need to be an expert to figure out that their actions are deliberate attempt to shield the government, we therefore call on the general public to debunk their statements since they were made to serve their paymasters.”