By Karimatou Jallow
Teachers for Change-Gambia have launched a strike over Covid-19 unpaid allowances as the group asked its members to stay away from schools until their allowances are paid by the authorities.
Abdoulie Jallow, secretary general of the group said: “We call on all members of TFC to stay away from school, until the authorities’ responsible respond to our demands accordingly. The TFC will employ all mechanism to consolidate the ongoing strike and we call on genuine teachers to support the move.”
“We seize this opportunity to affirm all authorities concerned that the issue of the Covid-19 allowance must be resolved shortly to prevent any inconveniency in the effective Teaching and learning. It is a shame that Gambian teachers have to go through such exploitation and injustice in the 21st century,” he added.
However, Lamin Nyassi Public Relation Officer COVID-19 allowance task force said that the government has promised to give out their Covid-19 allowance last year but they are yet to receive the money and were waiting hoping that the money will be paid in January, but nothing is in their accounts.
“We understand that regions that teachers didn’t risk anything during the pandemic have been paid, and this is the reason we embark on strike so that the authorities will give us our allowance.”
According to him, they were waiting for the government to pay all teachers at once, but it is recently that they got the information that one of the schools in the region one was paid.
He added that after their investigation on the matter, they decided to embark on strike because they were promise several times and still, they didn’t see anything.