Teachers in Ashanti Region cry over unpaid salaries, appeal for urgent redress

Some newly-validated teachers in the Ashanti Region are appealing to authorities in charge of their salaries to update them on exactly what is delaying their monies.

Speaking to GhanaWeb on condition of anonymity, one of the teachers, who started work in May 2022, but only got validated in November, said that it appears the person responsible for ensuring that their concerns about the delays in their monies are communicated, is sleeping on the job.

She explained that this suspicion is birthed from the fact that their other colleagues in other parts of the country have received at least their first salaries, with most of them being told every step of the way, what is happening.

The same, she added, cannot be said of she and her other 11 colleagues.

“We’ve tried speaking to the (sic) but he keeps telling us he’s on it, giving us different stories, but from what we see, he is just not serious about our plight. This is because we have colleagues in other districts and regions and any time we complain, they tell us their IGPTP guy has fed them with information that they will be paid. Actually, some of them got paid in January,” she said.

She also explained the processes they have so far gone through, and the hopes they have had.

“We got validated in November 2022 after we did our biometric at the GNAT Hall and then we were given staff IDs. We were supposed to be paid in December but when the December salaries came, we didn’t receive ours... the validations we did, our names appeared with our fingerprints, but we were not paid in November and in December.

“This January, I hear there were abnormalities in the validation. Our names also didn’t appear and we were not again paid this month. In all, I started teaching in May 2022, but we are 12 in total in my district,” she explained.

The teachers want urgency attached to their plights because, as the female teacher who spoke to GhanaWeb said, they are caught up in a lot of debts that they need to offset soon.

She also explained that they need their salaries because for most of them, they live very far from where they teach and that money could go a long way to help them commute in and out.

“The way we feel about this is that somebody somewhere is supposed to be attending to us but isn’t doing that and we also want to know if we are genuinely not being paid, or it’s just that the authorities to pay us are not being prompted to do so, because we have a lot of debts to pay.

“We teach very far from where we live. Boarding cars, feeding, and other issues are things that we’re struggling with,” she said.

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