President John Kufuor whose government is reeling under increased agitation from the labour front has turned the heat on civil society organizations slamming them for not taking up his call for a debate on wages and salaries.

Apparently surprised by the unwarranted criticisms on his government for not initiating the debate, the president expressed his disappointment at civil society organizations and institutions of higher learning for failing to take up the challenge.

“I was expecting say our institutes, learned institutes would take the challenge up and begin to analyze our pay structures in view of the strength of the economy, to try to see whether we couldn’t do better than the wages and salaries at present. I sit here I haven’t heard much from these institutes. Nor have I heard from our learned institutions like the universities; nor have I heard even much from the TUC…the employers and everybody else,” he said at a press conference in Accra.

He explained that government is aware of the difficulties been faced by many Ghanaians as a result of low wages and salaries, hence the call the debate to determine ways of improving the wages and salaries of workers.

“If government didn’t care, I wouldn’t have said as far back as April 2001 or so, I wouldn’t have asked the nation to join in debating for us to find a way forward to improve the wages and salaries of all of us including the president himself.”

He added further that “when I called for public debate I wasn’t talking of our coming into a hall like this as a nation to say whether my pay is okay or is not okay. That was not what I was calling for. Ghanaians are very intelligent people and we have all been suffering and pretending to be working and to be paid what we are due and the salary was not realistic, then productivity too was suffering.”

Flanked by his Ministers for Finance, Education, Public Sector Reform, Information and other spokespersons, the president said government is facing some difficulties but is trying to meet the numerous demands for pay increases.

Minister for Public Sector Reform Dr. Paa Kwesi Ndoum told journalists THAT the new salary structure which will be implemented from the beginning of next year would ensure equity in terms of public sector salaries. He indicated that presently government spends over 53% of the nation’s domestic revenue in paying public sector employees, a situation which already puts a lot of strain on government in implementing other developmental projects for the benefit of all Ghanaian tax payers.

The high profile press conference attended by the president was necessitated by the present chaos in the educational sector, with graduate teachers and some of their colleagues in the Ghana National Association of Teachers on an indefinite industrial action.