Warders bare teeth at Agyenim-Boateng

SOME PRISON officers who participated in a demonstration in the Bawku Municipality of the Upper East Region on Wednesday have described the statement of a Deputy Information Minister, James Agyenim-Boateng that a punitive action should be taken against them as unfortunate and unfair.

The three prison officers, who pleaded anonymity, made the statement when they spoke to DAILY GUIDE in a telephone.

They said though they know the rules governing their Service, they had to come out to cry for better salaries since internal procedures were not working.

According to them, their demonstration was peaceful and lasted for only one and half hours, but they deliberately decided not to alert the media because they only wanted to present a petition to the Municipal Chief Executive to be forwarded to the president and not to cause fear and panic.

They lamented that the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission had not treated them fairly but they wouldn’t blame the commission alone because if the senior officers of the Service who represented them during the job valuation session had sent preliminary information round to all personnel, they (demonstrators) would have given them an immediate feedback to fine-tune the their salary structure.

“This is where we are having a problem with Deputy Information Minister Agyenim Boateng’s comments in the media. We are not supposed to abandon our work to proceed on a demonstration, yes we know, but the expectation was that our leaders will do the talking for better salaries and working conditions for us. Unfortunately, from the look of things, they have abandoned that work and so we had to do it ourselves as human beings, not as prison officers.

The Deputy Information Minister was speaking from the technicality point of view. We don’t have a problem, because technicalities are very important, but it should not be valued more than human lives and comfort.

If the President directed him to say this, we would not blame him and if the Deputy Minister said it himself as a Minister, we equally would not blame him, after all, they are in power and enjoying better working conditions and chopping ‘nyafu nyafu’. Or maybe they want us all to join the Police Service.”

They stated that on the current salary scale, a constable in the Ghana Police Service receives a far higher salary than that of a chief officer in the Ghana Prison Service and a junior rank in Prison Service.

“We are waiting to see what will be done to personnel who took part in the demonstrations,” they added.