The Monstrous Legacy Arrears and Teachers Hardship, Frustration and Regrets
The teachers’ legacy arrears has been a monster teachers have to deal with but it has also become the biggest headache in recent times.
Just ask any of the senior basic school teachers and they will tell you that back pay of the teacher is indeed a legacy pay. It has always provided a reasonable lump sum income for the poor teacher who is paid a paltry of salary to be able to start a satisfactory life.
Back pay meant a legacy pay for the teacher. It bought the fridge, the television set and the living room sofas among others for the young teacher who began life in the teaching profession. In our case, we are been denied this teaching legacy and our back pay has rather become a legacy arrears fought for in the last seven years without any success yet.
It is heartbreaking to mention that when we were asked on several occasions to submit documents to various education offices to facilitate payment, the processes rather turned out to be oppressive and frustrating. I can count without exaggeration, at least seven of such exercises in futility that we have gone through in the last seven years just to have our monies we have worked for paid to us.
I do not intend to bother readers with some of the unlawful monies we are sometimes requested to pay at the various education offices to have our documents sent through for processing. However, I chose to share one nasty experience we encountered in 2016 that eroded my love for this ”noble” profession.
In 2016, teachers from about nine districts in the then Brong-Ahafo region who suffered this pay policy were asked to converge at the Bonokyenpem hall at Techiman for audit service verification and validation for payments to be effected.
Over fifteen hundred teachers by my estimation massed up at the Bonokyenpem hall to undergo the verification process. The needless chaotic scene on that day convinced some of us that we worth nothing as teachers to the nation we are serving.
At a point, the police were deployed to the scene to maintain order and to coach teachers who conduct routine morning assembly session for students on how to form proper queues and to fall in line to avert trouble and embarrassment.
The politics of it
When the three teacher unions hit back on this legacy arrears issue with a strike action sometime around February this year, there were claims that close to 90% of the legacy arrears have been paid to teachers.
I want to set some records straight here with my privilege position as a former student leader who got preview to some information on this matter. The previous government began payments of these arrears before they left office in 2016.
When this current administration took over, they have also supervised a good number of payments in the last three and a half years. However, there are still huge backlog yet to be cleared. The backlog is from new recruitments, promotions and reengagements.
Our growing fears now spur from the position of the current government uttered by the vice president, Dr. Mahamud Bawumia on peace FM that over 98% of the legacy arrears have been cleared.
This pronouncement was followed by a subsequent circular written by the Director General of the GES confirming same and going ahead to put a nominal figure of the 2% teachers left to be paid at 2,558. Meanwhile I know of a platform created for teachers owe legacy arrears that has at least 3000 members.
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Just last week Thursday September 24, there has been a new circular from the Ghana Education Service calling for the details of teachers who are owed legacy arrears to visit the various education offices with their documents to be processed. Part of the letter read that “the management of GES as part of efforts to bring finality to legacy arrears owed has submitted data of 11,420 staff”.
In the said letter, a new figure of 11,420 teachers are quoted as owed by the government.
The circular went viral along with a supposed list of teachers who are owed. In that very list circulating, some of my colleagues are still complaining of their missing names. Even though I cannot vouch for the claims of my colleagues because there are evidence of dishonesty on the part of some teachers who are reimbursed yet claim to be owed. However, the fact still remains that 11,420 cannot be the only number of teachers owed from this legacy arrears mystery.
Moreover, the teacher unions on the other hand had always disagreed with the government’s data and puts the total number of teachers owed the legacy arrears far higher than what the government claims. From a close assessment of both sides, I suspect one of these two scenarios is the case. Either there is mischief somewhere to regularise data for some obvious reasons or there is a data crash at the controller and accountant general’s department.
The latter is more plausible because of the recent migration of government employees on to a new payment platform that caused a change in staff identification number of some GES employees. In such an overhaul situation of a complex system such as a payroll database, data lost could be likely and tracing payment records may be difficult.
Should the suspicion of data lost be proven, there could be two primary available major documents that can prove the teacher’s case if he or she is actually owed by the government as they continue to cast doubt on arrears demand.
The first document is the monthly payslip which will show records of payments from the time appointment was given out to the teacher.
The payslip will also help to track when the first three months of salary arrears were paid and whether there have been any subsequent payments or not for which the teacher is laying claim. The second document is the bank account statements which will also show a detail of payment records from controller made to the teacher including all arrears payments.
Parties involved in this oscillation of arrears dispute who should have called attention to these possibilities are keeping quiet and our monies are gradually being lost in the wide.
We 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 batches of trained teachers who are still owed by the government with this three months pay policy are demotivated and living with hopelessness. The question we often ask ourselves is that will these monies ever be paid and if so, when.
Are we going to receive the same amount of what would have been paid to us in say 2013 in this day of 2020?
What about the exchange rate. If the government can find money from our taxes to pay monies depositors of mismanaged banks supervised by private individuals why should it be so difficult to raise money to pay statutory debt such as teachers’ salary arrears?
Part one of this content > >>> The stolen legacy of trained teachers: The untold story of legacy arrears
Source: Iddrisu Fuseini
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