The Ghana National Association of Teachers under the Provisional National Defence Council, 1982-1991: Caught in a Warp of Cooperation and Unresolved Grievances?

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT) and the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) regime from 1982 to 1991. It pays attention to grievances of teachers pursued by GNAT, methods employed to seek redress and what results it achieved. Faced with government insensitivity, GNAT was unable to militantly agitate for its demands. Situating the analysis in the socio-political and economic milieu of the 1980s, the paper argues that the relationship between the PNDC regime and GNAT remained frosty and jolty, throughout the duration of the existence of the regime, even though, GNAT did not see itself as antagonistic to the PNDC government. The PNDC government on the other hand, in addition to dissolving the political hub of the education sector, the Ghana Education Service (GES) Council, engaged actively in subjecting some key personalities in the education sector, who were members of GNAT, to one form of repression or another, even as it accepted memoranda, and engaged in round table discussions with GNAT over its grievances; the regime failed to actively resolve grievances of teachers presented through GNAT. Thus the PNDC government seemed to have employed simultaneously cooperative and repressive tactics in dealing with GNAT.