Ghanaian Teachers And The Caravan Through The Desert

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The remarkable thing about teachers is that very few of them are on record to have gone completely insane in class. Even the very depressed ones manage to sustain an engaging learning interest in their students, and tell funny tales to keep disappointed literature students laughing through a Mathematics class in a hot afternoon. In the USA, where some 26.4% of citizens lose their mental health every 12 months (World Bank data, 2004), a very small fraction of this figure, or may be none, may be teachers.

Another good thing about teachers, especially, Ghanaian teachers is that, they are natural experts in financial economics. The best way to learn financial discipline is not to have large amounts of money. So children of teachers have perfected the art of intelligent living; they know how to live within the insane salaries of their parents.

But there is a caravan moving through the desert of liberal capitalism; the market system that presents us with large volumes of wealth and choice, where what you earn is what you are worth. The story in most parts of the world is that, teachers are often at the back of the caravan. In fact, a large number of them don’t get to be in any of the wagons of the caravan at all. They only watch other professionals ride through the desert in first class wagons and wave them adieu, regretting why they ever had to make the sacrifice.

The caravan through the desert principle has recently been popularised by the leader of Britain’s Conservative party-David Cameron. It simply means that, instead of allowing professionals in a country to build a social structure where salary determines degree of comfort on the ladder of importance, let’s have a social redistribution system like a caravan, where all who get to contribute to the movement of the caravan get a decent share of the rewards. So that, a Tweapease teacher could afford a saloon car to please his wife, the same way his blockhead of a classmate at a financial institution has effortlessly procured a VW Golf for his unfaithful girlfriend and a good house at Kasoa. That’s all.

Is this not what teachers in Ghana have been calling for since the day before yesterday? We have tolerated a system where the teacher who owns a good car is the ultra-ambitious type, who has written several volumes of the same book. A young doctor does not need to write a textbook on Genecology without Tears, like his teacher friend who had to write two volumes of Economics without Tears, to buy a car or afford an expensive wedding.

The deceased MP of one of the constituencies in the Ashanti region, Hon. Kwasi Afrifa, was one of the best teachers Ghana has produced. In the 1990’s, if an A level student fancied a grade A in government, his books worked the magic. I visited him at his Opoku Ware residence in Kumasi, where I was impressed to have sat in a comfortable sofa, the kind you would find in the home of a banker. He owned an old VW beetle. Yet, he was thought to be a teacher luxuriating in relative comfort. He had had to live the life of a printing machine, printing his very life through thousands of pamphlets, to make a decent fraction of the salary of a rural bank manager.

So it was refreshing that the Minister of Education, Science and Sports, Papa Owusu Ankomah, recently announced a healthy increase in the salary of teachers, in the ambitious Ghana Universal Salary Structure. But our teachers have bemoaned the 30 and 47% increase, warning that Ghana’s educational infrastructure, the capitation grant and the free feeding programme will not succeed if teachers remain underpaid. ‘A dispirited teacher is worse than inadequate buildings, furniture and textbooks combined’, Kumasi NAGRAT has warned. See Ghanaweb news of 25/01/07.

To ask the question: how much money will be enough for a teacher, will also seek to ask: what kind of teacher? While this may sound like a riddle to Ghanaians, a Zimbabwean columnist has this to say about Ghanaian teachers: “They must learn from President Mugabe; he came back from Ghana, to lead the people. If he had remained in Ghana he would still be a teacher, hungry, ill paid, over-worked, accused, like most of them are, and under the ministry of the learned, innovative and illustrious.” (Zimdaily.com)

So the kind of teacher we are talking about is the hungry, ill paid, the over-worked and the accused. That also begs the question: why should an innovative ministry of education make conditions terrible for our teachers and make them so unequal to other workers?

Economists and financial scientists usually predict a system of ‘madness’ where there are unequal opportunities for people. Measuring inequality using the Gini coefficient means that, a value of one means one person has everything; the others have nothing, while a value of zero means the equality of the grave. Equality of the grave is where people just live with the bigotry of low expectations. Any system that persistently forces a category of its professionals into the grave risks a terrible polarization and frightening insecurity.

The teaching profession is a noble one. In Ghana, where teachers have the privilege of resorting to strike actions to press home demands, it is nobler. Ghanaian and most black teachers in the UK live a daily nightmare. Here, the average pupil goes to school with a laptop, an ipod and a luxury mobile phone. The educational system does not permit a teacher to discipline a pupil. Most black teachers say a prayer to God and sometimes fast before going to school to meet young pupils who would look a teacher in the eye and say ‘fuck off.’ I know a UK qualified Ghanaian teacher who has given up the profession for peace of mind, and is now a proud care worker, bathing and feeding old white women.

Education, Education, Education: Those were Tony Blair’s words when he became British Prime Minister in 1997. They remain the crux of his policies today. No country on the shores of history is reputed to have sidestepped education and succeeded in ensuring quality in other sectors. Teachers are the engines that power the very important sectors of our economy. They prepare the harvest and watch others bag the bumper.

Ghanaian teachers are not happy. If there were in Denmark, they will be much happier. The Danes are the happiest people on earth. There is less inequality, because apart from the daily bread, almost everything is supplied by a state bureaucracy. But, this may not be the best economic system. The British Medical Journal reports that the Danes have extremely low expectations. By international standards, they have the lowest (0.247), compared with the UK (0.36) and the US (0.408), World Bank figures, 2004.

Ghanaian teachers have reasonable expectations in a competitive system. Ours is an economy gravitating towards an imperfect mixture of triumphant American capitalism and sickening overdependence, where private entrepreneurship is encouraged: A lack of proper state welfare at the one end, an expensive pay as you go medicare at the other. So it takes money, real good money, to make a decent living.

This caravan idea does not sound bad. Of course, the government cannot afford a caravan for every worker in Ghana. But, all of us can enjoy a jolly good ride in a big caravan. At least, it will save our teachers the usual flip-flop from euphoria to despair whenever salary adjustments are announced. Who in Ghana gets a decent wage anyway?