No embargo on teacher employment - Ablakwa

Deputy Minister of Education in charge of tertiary, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa admitted that although there is a “net freeze” on public sector employment, the education and health sectors are an exception.

“The education and health sectors have been exempted from what we call the net freeze of employment. We constantly tell those who want to join this noble profession that there is no embargo,” he stressed on an interview with Radio Ghana.

The government in 2010 placed a ban on public sector recruitment in order to reduce the increasing wage bill.

In September 2014, the Minister of Finance, Seth Terkper disclosed that the embargo will soon be reviewed.

In July 2015 however, Mr. Terkper denied that the government had placed an embargo on employment into the public sector.

According to him, “employment is not just about the public service… We cannot keep an open-ended public service. We appreciate the need for employment. If we just kept it open-ended we will have people sitting and doing no job and being paid and we will use a disproportionate amount of the tax revenue to pay wages, allowances, and others, and not have enough for development.”

But Mr. Ablakwa in his interview said there is no embargo but rather, a net freeze in other sectors.

“Net freeze means in the other sectors is that when somebody dies or retires or resigns; that vacancy can be filled because if you look at the public sector numbers, we gave reached the limit.”

“Experts say that our public sector is even bloated. We have too many more workers than the Ghanaian public sector actually needs,” he added.

The Deputy Minister pointed out that the education and health sectors were excluded because “as I speak to you, there is a teacher deficit which is about 40,000.”

“We still have a number of pupil teachers in the system and it is because they have had to come in to support because we don’t have adequate people trained to be professional teachers. So we have said time and again that if you want to teach, you just have to send your applications to us either to the District Director of Education or to the Regional Director of Education.”

He nonetheless admitted that there are some challenges in the employment of teachers.

“What is happening though is that you will not be immediately interviewed and recruited. The list will be compiled and forwarded to the headquarters and then we will have to get clearance from the Ministry of Finance. I can assure you that this is going on.”

He this admonished all District Directors of Education to receive application letters from trained teachers and forward them to the Ministry of Education for the necessary processes to be undertaken.

“We have told them that they should let us know all the vacancies and also do a compilation and forward them to us. We are employing. It’s just that it appears there are some bottle necks.”