Please, let’s stop the mockery
I have said many times in this column and elsewhere that President John Mahama is a good friend of mine. I have also said that for our friendship, I find it very difficult to publicly criticise him, but without access to him apart from this column, I have on a few occasions reluctantly raised some of my criticisms here.
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I have also provided pieces of advice here in this same column, among which is my call on him to be wary of some of his ministers and people around him. I dare say again that some of his ministers are making mockery of his government with their utterances and actions.
From 2006, when as a nation we started participating in the World Cup tournaments, information is that we have always carried American dollars to tournament grounds to pay players and officials’ bonuses and allowances.
However, apart from Mallam Isa, the first Minister of Youth and Sports under Kufuor’s administration, losing $46,000 meant for the Black Stars during an African Nations Cup, no one would have known that huge foreign currencies were always carried in portmanteaus ‘following’ our players.
Since then, there have been a number of tournaments to which, I am sure, we have continued to carry huge amounts of dollars, and no one knew about the practice.
Despite these facts, Ghana has now become a laughingstock simply because Joseph Yamin, until a few days ago was a former deputy Minister of Youth and Sports, showed his credentials as a non-ministerial material by announcing to the world that over $3 million had been put on a flight from Accra to Brazil to pay Black Stars players and officials. This has been a big national disgrace, which has received widespread coverage in all the major international media.
As we continue to grapple with this disgrace, another shocking policy has taken the international media by storm, adding to the mockery. On Wednesday, July 2, our parliamentarians approved a $156 million World Bank loan to construct senior high schools (SHSs), provide scholarships for students in deprived communities and distribute free sanitary pads to needy or deprived students.
Building senior high schools and providing scholarships for deprived students are both good ideas worth considering. However, a few questions arise. The President and his party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), long before the elections in 2012 had as its main campaign agenda the building of 200 SHSs.
Is the current plan to build 23 SHSs with this loan the same as the campaign promise of the President? If this money is to finance that campaign promise, then on what basis (in terms of availability of funds) was the promise made? Or was it the usual campaign talk?
The other problem with this MoE loan disbursement is why it wants to borrow $15.6 million to provide scholarships when the government has promised us that SHS would be free from 2015? Will this $156m be just ‘koko sika’ for students? I wonder whether the Education Minister, Prof Jane Naana Opoku Agyemang, would ever take a high-interest bank loan just to give out as ‘saraka’ to presumed needy people. Common sense tells us that people make donations from what they have, but won’t borrow at high interest for donations.
What has rather generated heated arguments and also added to the national mockery on the international scene is the proposal to use part of this loan to distribute free sanitary pads to school girls in deprived communities.
Defending the policy on radio, the Education Minister, who is a former Vice Chancellor of the University of Cape Coast, insisted that from her rounds in deprived communities she found out that “girls are not in school because their parents could not afford sanitary pads for them.” She also says the project has a World Bank support.
She again notes that “it is not about the nice building, equipment and teacher alone, but the preparedness of the student and the role of the community in getting the child to go to school.” Everybody who has knowledge about education knows that it is not only building, equipment and the teacher which produce quality education.
I strongly disagree with her that the community’s role which she talked about was the provision of sanitary pads. I schooled in a rural area with girls from Class One to Form Four, but none ever dropped out because of lack of pads.
At Breman Asikuma where I was born, grew and spent most of my life until adulthood, the secondary school there had more girls than boys and enrolment figures continued to grow each year.
The decline in enrolment figures in most schools (basic and secondary) can best be attributed to bad educational policies over the years, and also more importantly due to bad economic policies of successive governments which meant that most parents became unable to send their children (not only girls) to school because of lack of income.
The Managing Director of Graphic Communications Group Limited, Mr Ken Ashigbey, in supporting the minister’s position, has stated that there is empirical basis and reasons from his own research as a national service person at Kaneshie Kingsway and Kpeve Secondary Technical schools that girls drop out of school because of lack of sanitary pads. “I know the difficulty girls go through where there are no toilets. I’m also aware of the stigma they suffer when they soil themselves due to lack of pads,” he notes.
In both Naana Opoku Agyemang and Ashigbey’s defence of the policy, they mentioned lack of toilet as part of the causes of girls dropping out. If that is what the education minister found from her travels around the country, why then has she chosen to supply pads instead of building toilets in schools?
Mr Ashigbey failed to tell us when he did his research, what was his sample size, and what were his findings which made him to arrive at his “empirical basis and reasons.” His arguments are therefore not convincing.
As a nation, we need to move away from policy-based warped analysis. This is the reason why our parliamentarians must begin to see things with their own eyes and hear things with their own ears, instead of seeing and hearing things through and from their party whips.
One is disappointed that there has not been any cogent arguments to warrant Ghana, which lacks money to provide electricity, water and fuel, to borrow money to supply sanitary pads not for all girls, but a selected few.
I have just visited Manya Krobo Senior High and Asutsuare Senior Technical schools where I saw more girls than boys. At Manya Krobo, the students were going for breakfast without milk, bread or egg. At Asutsuare, the students use an abandoned and dilapidated canteen of the defunct sugar factory as an assembly hall. And this is the 21st century but we are going to borrow high interest loan to supply sanitary pads.
We need to stop this theatre of mockery created through warped policies.
PS: Mr Inspector-General of Police, having openly accepted that the Police Service had done some wrong in recent past, would you please respond to the children and widow of Adjei Akpor, the 22-year-old man your men killed at Adenta on January 6, 2014, and give them justice? This is the 25th week since the man was killed. Can any human rights lawyers come to my aid in fighting this case for the defenceless family?
The author is a Journalist and Political Scientist. He is the Head of the Department of Media and Communication Studies, Pentecost University College, Accra. - [email protected]
