UG students threaten to demonstrate over lecturers’ strike
The Students’ Representative Council (SRC) of University of Ghana, has given an indication that it would embark on demonstration next week to express its unhappiness over the ongoing industrial strike by university lecturers.
Mr Edmond Kombat, SRC President of the University told the Ghana News Agency in an interview on Friday.
The SRC has been meeting with the leaderships of the University Teachers Association of Ghana (UTAG) and the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission (FWSC) to push for a dialogue but to no avail, said Mr Kombat.
According to him, the student body was very angry and frustrated with UTAG and FWSC entrenched positions and would therefore not allow them to use students as a tool for negotiations.
“As it is now we are about to write exams and science students who have acquired life animals for experiments are not supervised, it means these animals will die.
“At the end, half baked graduates are likely to be produced to handle national affairs in future”, he noted.
Mr Kombat expressed fear of the undue pressure likely to mount on students and lecturers to complete course outline even when the strike was over.
He said the student leadership would meet this evening to plan the intended demonstration.
The strike has brought academic activities to a standstill, because lecturers do not report to teach giving way for students to loiter, Mr Kombat said.
He suggested government should often act on its promise and expand its means of generating income to address issues of arrears relating to public sector workers.
He also said government functionaries needed to always allow state institutions to carry out their functions freely without external interference, particularly when workers go on strike.
The institutions mandated to deal with the public sector pay issues ought to be well resourced with finance and personnel to enable work properly to avert recurrent strikes with its concomitant effects on academic work, he added.
Source: GNA