We
the leadership of the Cape Coast Polytechnic Student Representative Council in
the Central region of Ghana have gathered through this procession to register
our discontentment over the conscious rnarginalization and demeaning of
Polytechnic education and the situation of government's inability to create and
maintain the systems we need to run our education without pointless
interruptions.
Ladies
and Gentlemen, today we have thousands of polytechnic students who cannot
become graduates because their lecturers are striking over pay and working
conditions for closely three weeks and all we hear from stakeholders is that
the said strike action was illegal due to some purported ambiguity of a sort
contained in notice for declaring the industrial action. For us as students who
have fulfilled our part of the deed by paying fees and making ourselves
available for training, the least we expected was government's refusal to
settle its indebtedness to our lecturers. We are not prepared to dabble in the
legalities of the strike action. If you are a government and your employees
embark on an illegal strike leaving students to suffer all losses, what are
supposed to do? We are surprised that government was made aware from months ago
on this strike and did nothing to prevent what it calls an illegal strike.
Always government is only interested in protecting its name and not the
citizens. Government has coiled back to relax after coming out to respond to
the strike as illegal, leaving students to suffer the loss. Simple logic
demands that an employer seeks the law to compel his employees to call of an
illegal strike. Why is government not doing so if indeed the strike is illegal?
To us we believe government has at its disposal all it needs to avert this loss
on students.
OUR DEMANDS
That our teachers be made to return
to the lectures halls with immediate effect. How to get them is not part of our reasoning. It
is about time the government took polytechnic education serious.
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