Academic activities face disruption as university unions, including the Tertiary Education Workers’ Union of Ghana (TEWUG), declare a strike over concerns relating to pay, working conditions and pensions.
Students at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) were left stranded as lecture halls remained locked on Thursday (1 February).
Checks on campus revealed that lectures had been cancelled until further notice, even though the university says it is putting measures in place to mitigate the impact on students’ learning.
Some students who spoke to Asaase News are concerned about missing classes.
“I didn’t know until a colleague told me that there was a strike, so I told him to check the lecture halls and, indeed, that was true,” said 21-year-old Mary Aggrey. “It won’t be pleasant going forward.
“This happened two years ago and now we have been hit again. This is going to affect students at the end,” she said.
“We are having an afternoon class now and our lecturer says that as a result of the TEWUG strike, we are deprived of a microphone. We could barely hear him teach.
“At the end of the day, studies will be halted and we would be at the suffering end,” another student said.
Several critical services have also experienced disruption. According to our reporters, the university campus is now surrounded by accumulating trash, posing a significant health hazard to students.
Many rubbish bins situated across the campus have not yet been cleared.
The Teachers and Education Workers Union-Ghana (TEWUG), joining forces with other unions, expects the strike to affect essential services in tertiary institutions.
Speaking to journalists, the national chairman of TEWUG, Sulemana Abdul-Rahman, said that the union members would return to work only if their concerns were addressed.
Abdul-Rahman said that task forces will be put in place to ensure total compliance of the 10,000-plus members in all public universities.
“We are going to make sure that we have task forces across all the university campuses. We have local leaders across all the public universities so they will make sure they put in place the task force to make sure that they monitor for everybody to comply with the strike action,” he said.
He added that he expects every member of TEWUG to comply to press home their demands to the government.
“The local leaders must make sure that the strike action is enforced. Any loyal member of TEWU-Ghana, they’re rather angry and pushing us to declare this strike. So, there’s no way any loyal member of the public universities will defy the directives or orders as far as the union is concerned,” he stressed.
Meanwhile, the National Labour Commission (NLC) has lashed out at the labour unions in the education sector which are currently on strike, describing their action as “unmeritorious” and “needless”.
Executive secretary Ofosu Asamoah is contemplating legal action to compel them to go back to work.
Jonathan Ofori and Richmond Opoku, KNUST, Ashanti Region
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