Nagging feeding grant
William F. Halsey maintains that “all problems become smaller if we do not dodge them, but confront them”.
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Majority of Ghanaians, particularly those in government, will go to every length to justify why the state should continue to provide subsidy to boarding school students in secondary or senior high schools in the northern part of the country.
Indeed, in the thinking of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), especially as espoused by Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, there is more than enough justification to expand the facility to cover every eligible Ghanaian child to secure free secondary school education, which helped to reduce the last campaign to free education from the NPP, as against quality education, from the National Democratic Congress (NDC), as if free and quality are mutually exclusive and not complementary.
But, for as long as the government recognises the need to sustain the subsidy, but does not make provision for it as appropriate, but has to engage in emergency as if we have no idea about such recurrent expenditure, the beneficiaries may not be provided quality education.
For as long as I have been in journalism, there has not been a single year that school authorities in the affected areas have not cried themselves hoarse, before government rushes to find a solution to the problem.
How can we indicate that an expenditure is necessary and functional, as my VANDAL mate, Dr Clement Apaak, animatedly and justifiably argued, and yet leave the school authorities in desperation before their demands are met.
Thus, each year, students in those areas have to stay home, while their counterparts are in school studying although they go through the same syllabi and take the same examination. When it happens that way, it reflects deliberate neglect and brings into focus the shabby treatment, of an image of long queues of patients waiting with their subscriptions at pharmacies enrolled with the national health insurance scheme (NHIS), while their counterparts with cash to purchase the drugs are served as soon as they show up at the pharmacies.
It is not the fault of the students who come from the affected areas that they are offered subsidy. It is a national policy and, therefore, these innocent children must not be made to bear the lack of initiative and resourcefulness from government.
For as long as the country is united that money should not necessarily be a bar to education in the northern parts of the country due to a colonial government policy to deny people from that part of the country access to education, and for as long as there are political parties whose philosophy favours wholesale provision of free secondary school education, timely release of funds towards that purpose must be a national priority.
After all, does it make sense to pay the salaries of workers who have responsibility for the students regularly, while the grants for the continual stay of the students are delayed, leaving the workers idle? We need to confront the problem head-on and take it as a national priority, rather than as an optional matter for which we do not have an alternative solution.
Education is the only means of bridging the gap between those who have and those who do not have. It is thus unpardonable for the subsidy to remain in arrears for more than a term. In the schools where students pay the full fees, they are usually sent home to collect their fees otherwise they are denied access to the dining halls.
In situations where parents who fail to pay the fees of their wards are made to feel the sense of betrayal of their children, there is the need to hold government accountable for bad planning and inefficient resource allocation which result in the denial of the full timetable for students who find themselves in these schools by accident of geography.
There may be some in these schools whose parents could afford the fees, but are not doing so because of public policy. Such parents and their children must never be made to feel that they are not equal to their counterparts in other parts of the country, because they enjoy subsidies which never come on time.
Now, the government has released money for the third term of the 2012-2013 and first term of the 2013-2014 academic years. It only means that the schools would continue to operate in arrears. What is available now will have to be used to pay for last year. There may be little left for this year. The cost of capital to them then may be very expensive, because they will never have access to cash, as their counterparts in other parts of the country do. Indeed, for some of the schools, the full fees have to be paid on the re-opening date, otherwise the student would be refused entry into the boarding house.
The expectation, therefore, is that government must ensure that the feeding grant to the affected schools for this term is released to be used within the term, and not to wait until the end of the academic year for another outburst of protests from the schools’ authorities before we frenetically search for funds to meet such anticipated and justifiably accepted functional expenditure.
Each time the dysfunctional cycle is repeated, it disheartens the hearts of headmasters who have responsibility to manage these schools and puts them under stress, which is needless, avoidable unwarranted and contradicts the national feeling that free secondary education is desirable and nationally appealing.