The General Secretary of the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), Thomas Musah Tanko has criticised the Ghana Education Service (GES) for asking the headmaster and the senior housemaster of Ghana Senior High School (GHANASCO), in Tamale to step aside for investigations into alleged conversion of toilet cubicles into residential accommodation for students without reports from investigations.
GES in a press release on April 16, asked both the headmaster and senior housemaster to step aside for a thorough investigation into a video on social media showing some students were allegedly using toilet cubicles as dormitories.
According to Thomas Musah Tanko, his outfit’s investigations into the matter revealed that the said cubicles were study areas for students.
He explained that initial reports by the media about the occurrences left questions in his mind since he was convinced that no human in the right frame of mind will allow the students to sleep in a place originally designed as a toilet space.
“The difficulty I had when I heard the news was that, will a headmaster go and put students in a toilet? Will they do that? Will a rational human being do that?” he quizzed.
“But upon a thorough investigation by the team that went there, we have realised that this is an old thing that the students do; that they go there to study.
“So please the Ghana Education Service should take it easy. We rather want to remind them that the Capitation Grant has not been paid for over two years now,” he said in an interview with a journalist at Accra-based station TV3.
Mr Tanko said the same speed the GES used to act on allegations from the purported video should translate into the speedy payment of the Capitation Grant.
He added that the delay in the payment had forced headmasters to use their own resources to run the institutions, and wondered if the GES should also be sanctioned for that too.
Meanwhile, the Old Students Association of GHANASCO have descended heavily on the journalist who first reported the matter for doing a poor job.
They said this has been an age-long practice in the school and those cubicles are not meant to be dormitories but storerooms where the students keep their trunks and chop boxes during vacation.