I started free SHS in 2015, not Akufo-Addo - John Mahama claims
- Former President Mahama says he has always been a supporter of free SHS
- The presidential candidate of the NDC added that the policy will see massive improvement under his next administration
- But a deputy education minister, Dr. Yaw Osei Adutwum, says Ghana’s education will be in the abyss under Mahama
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The National Democratic Congress (NDC) started the free Senior High School policy first, the party’s presidential candidate, John Dramani Mahama, has said.
According to the former president, his administration started the policy in 2015.
“We started the programme and the NPP came and continued it. Unfortunately, the implementation has been very poor, and so it ended us in double track,” he stressed.
Mahama was speaking at Tuobong, a community in the Tempane District of the Upper East Region during a three-day campaign tour of the Region ahead of the upcoming general elections scheduled for Monday, December 7, 2020.
The pro-poor education policy is the flagship policy of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP). The policy was successfully rolled out in September 2017, after the NPP won the 2016 elections in Ghana.
It has ensured that hundreds of thousands of students are in secondary school. A little over 400,000 students were said to have benefited from the policy in its first year of implementation.
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Mahama said he will end the double-track system component of the policy within one year of his next administration, noting: “I assure you, my countrymen.”
He pledged to complete all the Community Day Schools “we were building, 200 of them, so that all the children can get schools to attend.”
Meanwhile, a deputy education minister, Dr. Yaw Osei Adutwum, warned that Mahama’s lack of understanding of Ghana’s educational system will lead to the collapse of secondary school education in the country.
He said the proposal by the former president to abolish the double track system within one year “will destroy Senior High School as we know it.”
In an earlier report, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo said critics of the policy have been put to shame by the impressive performance of its first beneficiaries.
The West African Examinations Council (WAEC) on Friday, November 13, 2020, released interim results of candidates who sat for the WASSCE in 2020.
Analyses of the results had shown massive improvements in the performance of candidates as compared to the 2019 batch.
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Source: YEN.com.gh
