UTAG members urged to teach pending determination of strike after Monday

The National President of the University Teachers Association of Ghana (UTAG), Professor Solomon Nunoo has urged its members to return to the lecture sroom for the meantime pending the determination of whether or not to suspend the industrial action.

He explained that the National Executive Committee (NEC) of UTAG will schedule a new extraordinary meeting to deliberate on the way forward after all fifteen member campuses complete their referendum on suspending the strike.

Speaking on the JoyNews Channel’s Newsfile on Saturday, February 26, 2022, He clarified that the NEC will take steps to set a new meeting date after receiving the remaining voting results from the referendum other Universities by Monday.

“Per our UTAG constitution, once a strike has been suspended, we have to go back to the classroom and go back to teaching. Whether a campus has voted against the suspension or for the suspension, all of us will go back to the classroom to lecture.

At the end of the referendum, we’d collate the results. After the collation, the next step is that if majority of the members say we need to continue with the strike, then an extraordinary meeting of the National Executive Committee will have to be constituted to determine the date for the next strike action,” He said.

The National Executive Committee of UTAG suspended its seven-week-old strike on Tuesday, February 22, 2022, after a meeting on Monday.

The resolution to suspend the strike will however have to be put before all fifteen members of the Association, who have five days within which to vote to reject or accept the decision.

Eight member campuses including the University of Education Winneba (UEW), the University for Environment and Natural Resources (UENR), the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), the University for Professional Studies, Accra (UPSA), the University for Development Studies (UDS), the University of Environment Sustainable Development, Somanya (UESD), C.K. Tedam university of technology and applied sciences and the University of Ghana (UG) have so since voted to reject NEC’s decision to suspend the strike.

This implies that more than 50% of UTAG member associations rejected the NEC’s decision to suspend the strike.

At the time of this publication, the University of Health and Allied Sciences, Ho (UHAS) is the only tertiary institution that is backing the NEC resolution to halt the industrial action.

UTAG had been on strike since January 10 to force the government to restore the conditions of service agreed upon in 2012.

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