Teacher Trainees to stage ‘Y33 Gye Y3n Sika’ demo over 6months unpaid 'allowa'

Teacher trainees across the 46 Colleges of Education in Ghana say they are preparing for a mammoth demonstration against the Ministry of Education and their Principals.

The first part of their demonstration, they say, is going to be on social media where the thousands of them would constantly speak their minds till they are heard.

Their next step if the social media protest fails, they added would be a match to the Ministry of Education, then to the Presidency to voice out their plights.

According to the students, there are three main reasons for embarking on the demonstration.

They mention the “deliberate delay in payment of their allowances, high fees for final year students and claim for their feeding component”.

Public Relations Officer for Ashanti, Bono and Ahafo (ASHBA) sector of the students, Daniel Kiss speaking to ModernGhana News noted that only GH400 out of GH1600 has been paid them for the semester, representing only two out of eight month’s allowances.

The non-payment of the allowances, he noted, has pushed them into sufferings including their inability to travel to their places of teaching practice, inability to rent rooms for the teaching practice among others.

He also said final year students have never paid school fees which are higher than the continuing students, however they have been asked to pay GH1300 while they expecting something around GH700- GH800.

“This is the period we are not going to use the school’s facilities or eat from the school. They are not going to teach us because we are out on teaching practice so why do they have to increase our fees this much”, he asked miserably.

Master Kiss told this reporter that even though the Minister of Education, Hon Yaw Osei Adutwum has instructed their principals to release their feeding fees for the Covid-19 era to them because they were all at homes, their principals have refused to pay them those amounts too.

“We have done everything possible to get back our feeding components but it has failed because the principals say they won’t release it to us, not even when the Minister of Education asked us to go for it”.

He argues that since they were not in school and had not eaten from there, what stops their principals from refunding their allowances to them.

He added that even if the funds had been used to buy the foodstuff in bulk, it should have reflected in their semester fees “which didn’t happen”.

The PRO also noted that even though they will be going back to the Minister of Education, they first want to sound the bells for people in government to know what is going on so that “fair-minded persons in authority will begin to do what is right before the students begin their actions which am sure will be very costly to government”.