Bright Wireko-Brobby, the country’s deputy minister for employment and labor relations, has urged teacher unions to display restraint as the government works around the clock to pay their Tier-2 pension arrears.
He stated in a Friday interview with Eyewitness News:
“This is not the first time we’ve been in arrears, but it is not something that government will renege on. I beg them, we should engage.
We acknowledge that we are in arrears. I plead with my teacher unions to exercise restraint.
Everybody knows what the country is going through. We will start engaging them and see how we can bridge the gap.”
The National Association of Graduate Teachers, the Coalition of Concerned Teachers, and the Teachers and Educational Workers Union (TEWU) were among the teacher unions that claimed the government had fallen behind in paying their Tier 2 pensions by more than GH400 million.
It is not illegal for such pension payments to be in arrears, according to Mr. Wireko-Brobbey, who is also the representative for the Hemang Lower Denkyira constituency in parliament.
But he advised the teachers to stop talking about anything in the media and start talking to the government.
“I am taken aback a bit because these are issues that are not new to us, and we keep resolving them and I wanted to even ask the teachers the rationale for taking this to the public domain,” he iterated.
My attention was drawn to it this morning, but who doesn’t know that we are in a financial crisis now?
What matters to us most is to be able to pay every worker at the end of the month and that is what we have been doing,” he added.
Additionally, he gave the assurance that the arrears will be paid eventually, but not right away, as pensions are not intended for use right now.
To that effect, he said:
“Pensions have a history, and we contribute to it for the future. What is important in these difficult times is that every worker must be paid every month and that is what we have been doing, and we have been paying them timely since COVID-19 came.
Pensions are not too problematic because it’s for the future, we find money and pay it, and now we are in arrears.
We admit we are in arrears and that is not a matter to escalate to the media when we have acknowledged that we will pay, and it is not criminal to owe,” he added.
The deputy employment minister also stated that his office would meet with the head of the teacher unions the following week to discuss how to resolve the crisis.