THE Vice Rector of the Tamale Polytechnic, Dr Kheni Nongiba Alkanam, has bemoaned the alarming rate at which the polytechnic is losing its staff to the various universities in the country, thereby affecting its academic work.
He, therefore, called on the government to improve the salaries and conditions of service for the polytechnic staff, stressing “we will be able to deliver well only if we have the capacity to maintain the core of highly skilled staff”.
Dr Alkanam stated this at the 15th Matriculation of the polytechnic in Tamale.
In all 2,291 freshmen made up of 720 females were admitted while a total of 2,544 candidates applied to pursue Higher National Diploma (HND) courses at the polytechnic for the 2009/2010 academic year.
The courses include Accountancy, Secretaryship and Management, Marketing, Statistics, Mechanical Engineering, Building Technology and Industrial Arts.
Additionally, 868 candidates were admitted to pursue Diploma in Business Studies (DBS) courses for the 2009/2010 academic year.
The Vice Rector expressed regret that “we are always at the receiving end where we have to continue to recruit to fill gaps created by the sudden departure of our staff”.
“It is a fact that most of the cream of our staff continue to run to the universities and other places for greener pastures after we have spent huge sums of money on their training”, he stressed.
According to the Vice Rector, the polytechnic had continuously strived to improve the welfare and general conditions of service of staff, adding that “we have recruited quite a number of teaching staff in the last three years in order to improve on our faculty while encouraging existing faculties to go for further studies”.
Dr Alkanam said that the recruitment of staff had its own challenges, saying “our personnel emoluments budget has more than doubled in the last year, meaning we would no longer be able to pay salaries until we receive our pay cheque from government”.
He mentioned inadequate office and residential accommodation as some of the challenges facing the polytechnic and expressed the hope that contractors would complete and hand over buildings to the institution in the next couple of months to address the challenges.
“A substantial amount of our Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund) allocation for 2009 was allocated to the administration block and some of our staff flats; we are very positive that we would take over the administration block and two sets of flats before the end of the year”, the Vice Rector noted.
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