A Senior Lecturer of Public Sector Accountancy and Finance at the Accra Technical University, Dr. Ibrahim Zubairu, has described President Nana Addo’s free Senior High School Policy as a repackaged programme.
According to him, the free SHS policy is not different from the progressively free Senior High School education that was introduced by the erstwhile Mahama administration.
Speaking with Umaru Sanda Amadu on Citi FM’s news analysis and current affairs Programme ‘The Big Issue’, Dr. Ibrahim Zubairu accused the Akufo-Addo administration of populism.
“Everything that the Finance Minister has said in relation to the free SHS does not cover all the cost.
If you take admissions, tuition etc, nobody pays tuition in Ghana. No Ghanaian pays tuition even up to the university level… What we pay is the academic facility user fees at the University. Indeed, if we want to ignore that and claim that was not enough, I think there should be some decorous in churning out some of these things to the public.
“The only problem is that the communicators at the time did not explain well to Ghanaians.
I think they did not want to be too populist in that regard but go back and ask managers of the education institutions what was happening and what had been announced, whether there is a very serious dichotomy between what was announced and what has been occurring. You will see that there is no difference.”
Where is policy document on free SHS?
President of IMANI, Franklin Cudjoe, who also spoke on The Big Issue, said the seeming lack of a policy document seems to have generated all the questions about the timelines and scope of the policy.
“The challenge over conceptualization of policy and its implementation has always been a problem in this part of our world for major political parties.
I kept asking myself where is the green paper on free SHS because it has been eight years since 2008, and some of the challenges we are dealing with right now point to the fact that because there has not been a clear written policy seems to be the reason why we are going back and forth.
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