New Pay For Teachers-GH¢66m Arrears to be Settled (Front Page)

Story: Lucy Adoma Yeboah (January 12, 2008)
THE Ministry of Finance has approved a new salary structure for teachers, with retrospective effect from January 1, 2007.
Following the approval, a total of GH¢66 million will be paid in arrears to about 322,000 teachers nation-wide.
The decision follows the agreement reached between the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT) and the government during the 2007 salary negotiations which touched on distortions and wrong job placement and the need to design a new salary structure for teachers of the Ghana Education Service (GES).
A letter on the issue, dated January 4, 2008 and signed by the Deputy Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, Professor George Gyan-Baffour, to the Controller and Accountant General directed that the arrears from January to December 2007, should be paid at the end of this month.
The arrears are the remaining 10 per cent out of a 100 per cent arrears which resulted from some corrections made on teachers’ pay structure, payment of which was started by the government in 2007.
Information gathered at the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning indicated that the decision for the new salary structure for teachers was the outcome of a final cleaning-up exercise embarked on to correct distortions and wrong job placements found on the salary structure of the Ghana Universal Salary Structure (GUSS) which negatively affected teachers.
The Ministry’s letter, headed, “Implementation of Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT) and the Government”, stated that staff of the GES who left the service from January 1 to December 31, 2007, should also benefit from the new directive.
“Please note that the computation of gratuity, pension and social security of all teachers who left the GES during the period January 1 to December 31, 2007 should be based on the attached salary structure referred to in Paragraph 1 above,” it stated.
The said new salary structure, headed, “Appendix A — Salary Structure for Teachers of the Ghana Education Service, Effective: January 1, 2007”, indicated salaries per annum due each category of teachers from Level One to 22 and also from Step One to 15.
The letter was copied to a number of stakeholders, including the Minister of Education, Science and Sports, the Director-General of the GES and the General Secretary of GNAT.
In an interview with the Daily Graphic in Accra on Tuesday, the Director of Policy Analysis of the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, Mr Kwabena Oku-Afari, said the decision to implement the new salary structure came out of an MoU signed between the government and the GES, on one hand, and GNAT, on the other, in 2007.
He said that was after a series of negotiations between the two groups to find solutions to the distortions in the salaries of teachers and also their job placement, as compared to other government employees with similar qualifications.
He stated that attempts to correct those anomalies resulted in further problems because of the lack of adequate data and correct information on salaries, adding that salary admininstration in the country had always remained a big problem because of the lack of the correct database.
Mr Oku-Afari, however, stated that some achievements had been made in that area and expressed the hope that things would get better.
He expressed the hope that the newly-established Fair Wages and Salaries Commission (FW&SC) would come up with lasting solutions to the issue of salary distortions in the public sector.