NAGRAT President Alleges SHS Manual Cultural Sabotage

“This cannot be an accident,” said the President of the National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT), Jacob Anaba, as he reacted to the discovery of controversial gender identity content in a Senior High School teacher manual that has since been withdrawn.

Speaking on Joy News’ PM Express on Wednesday, Mr Anaba said the inclusion of the material raised serious questions about intent, especially given Ghana’s past rejection of similar content.

“If you recall, in 2017, this was put in the curriculum, and we all raised hue and cry about it,” he said. “And the government promised they were removing it. In 2019, that was in the curriculum.”

The controversy centres on the Year Two Physical Education and Health (Elective) Teacher Manual developed in 2024 to support the rollout of the new SHS curriculum introduced last academic year.

Although the manual was approved, printed with public funds and distributed nationwide, NaCCA later acknowledged that sections on “gender identity” did not align with Ghanaian culture, norms and values.

The manuals have since been withdrawn and replaced with a revised version that reflects a biological understanding of gender.

For the NAGRAT President, the explanation that the content slipped through existing systems is not convincing.

“So those who put it in the manual must be a group of people who do not want the Ghana we have,” he said.

Mr Anaba said teachers first detected the content this year and raised concerns promptly.

“This was discovered this year, and teachers raised issues about it,” he said. “It came to our attention, and we wrote to NaCCA indicating our displeasure about what we have found in the manual.”

Host of the programme, Evans Mensah, asked whether NaCCA responded when NAGRAT first alerted them.

“The response was that they were correcting them,” Mr Anaba said. “So they were making sure that those definitions would be exchanged from the manual.”

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