Legal practitioner, Austin Kwabena Brako-Powers, has said the erstwhile Akufo-Addo administration should partly be blamed for the ongoing strike by the Civil and Local Government Staff Association of Ghana (CLOGSAG).
CLOGSAG commenced its industrial action on Monday, March 9, 2026, following what it describes as the government’s failure to implement their agreed conditions of service with the previous government in 2019.
This is biting hard as many departments, ministries and agencies have been affected, including local government offices throughout the country, where members of the Association constitute a substantial portion of the administrative workforce.
According to leadership of CLOGSAG, the government’s repeated failure to heed to the agreement is the reason for the industrial action.
Although the National Labour Commission (NLC) has directed the Association to suspend the planned strike and resume negotiations, it says it will not comply until government gives them what they require.
It has instructed its members nationwide to disregard the NLC’s directive and lay down their tools, insisting that the government has not adequately responded to their concerns.
Public Relations Officer of the Association, Edmund Aquaye, prior to the commencement of the strike today, had indicated that leadership had not received any formal communication from the government since the strike notice was issued last week.
“Since last Thursday, when we gave the announcement for the strike, the National Executive Council of CLOGSAG has still not heard anything from our employer, and for that matter, our strike is still on. We are entreating all CLOGSAG members, wherever they are, not to go to work on March 9,” he stated.
Speaking on the BigIssue segment on the NewDay morning show on Tuesday, March 9, 2026, Brako-Powers said the issue with labour is not peculiar to this administration, especially when the bone of contention now stems from an agreement made by the previous administration.
“We haven’t treated labour issues seriously and it didn’t start this term. I mean that it didn’t start in this regime,” he stated.
“CLOGSAG is saying they signed two Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for salary hike and I’m troubled that six years down the line, very little progress has been made,” he stated.
He questioned why the Akufo-Addo administration failed to implement the agreement since they signed it and also had the opportunity to implement same, saying they are partly to be blamed for the mishap.
“During the Nana Akufo-Addo administration, they promised to implement the agreement on January 1st 2025 and what happened? So the current disruption, the previous administration is partly to be blamed.
“The agreement was signed in 2019 and they postponed the implementation to 2025 and they gave assurance to the labour union that they were going to implement on January 1st 2025, were they not in power then? When they were preparing the three months budget to cater for the transition period, why didn’t they factor it?” he quizzed.
Meanwhile, government is still in talks with leadership of the Association for the way forward after the first meeting ended inconclusively.
