POTAG MUST GO TO NEGOTIATING TABLE (PAGE 11)

Story: Samuel Duodu, Sunyani

THE government has been called upon to ensure that the Polytechnic Teachers Association of Ghana (POTAG) goes to the negotiations table to resolve all outstanding issues to avert any possible strike action to enable the academic year to end successfully.
The government should not wait for a strike action by polytechnic teachers before it takes any action, since it was students who suffered whenever such strike actions occurred.
The President of the Sunyani Polytechnic (S-Poly) Engineering Students’ Association of Ghana (PESAG), Mr Saeed Mohammed, made the call at the launch of the S-Poly PESAG Week celebration, which has the theme “The Role of Engineering in Economic Development of the Nation”, at Sunyani.
He appealed to the government to grant scholarships for further studies to lecturers in the polytechnics to build on the human resource base to run Higher National Diploma (HND) and Building Technology (B-Tech) Degree programmes in the mechanical and electrical departments, for the socio-economic development of the country.
Mr Mohammed urged the government to consider the use of solar energy as an alternative source of power generation, since it had several advantages which included reliability, high efficiency, was noiseless and smokeless.
“It is obviously known that one of the expectations of engineering is to convert natural resources into products that make life comfortable and mother Ghana is blessed with solar energy, especially in the northern part of the nation where we can get an average sun radiation of about five hours per day”, Mr Mohammed observed.
He, therefore, urged the government to give serious consideration to solar as an alternative source of power generation.
Mr Mohammed said the S-Poly PESAG had expertise in the area of electricity energy generation from solar and that recently the association trained 60 students in solar stand power systems, which could be tapped for the benefit of the nation.
Mr Mohammed also called on the government and other corporate bodies to come to the aid of the polytechnics by helping to equip their engineering departments with research facilities such as computer laboratories and engineering libraries.
Mr Dan Arthur of Ghana Telecom (GT) called on polytechnics to develop websites which would serve them locally and internationally and also help students to register on-line when school was about to re-open, organise alumni and a small library on the internet to increase the knowledge of students.
He also called for the adoption of ICT as a tool by the country for its socio-economic advancement, adding that the Asian countries used ICT for development.