‘Clueless’ Mahama should tell us what he will do with free SHS - Bawumia
The Vice-President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, has thrown a challenge to former President John Mahama to come up with a concrete alternative policy which is better than the current double track system under the government’s Free Senior High School (SHS) policy.
Using the rotational church service system to support his argument, the Vice-President asked if a church would drive away the excess congregation if there was not enough chairs to accommodate them.
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“If you have a church and you have more and more people coming to your church but you do not have enough seats in the church, do you drive them away?
“You do first, second and third service if you need to do it.
You don’t say go home until I build another church before you come to church.
This is the thinking behind the double track system.
We will double track until we complete the construction of all the facilities”, he emphasised.
Dr Bawumia said it was “interesting to hear former President Mahama say yesterday that now he is committed to free SHS education but he says he will review it when he comes.
You have been criticising this policy since 2012, but as of today (August 15, 2019) he is not able to tell us exactly what he will do,” Dr Bawumia said at Asuboi in the Ayensuano District in the Eastern Region yesterday at the inauguration of a $4.5-million fertiliser blending plant under the government’s One district, One factory (1D1F) policy.
Give us alternatives
He told the gathering that the vision and the bold step taken by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to implement the free SHS as well as the 1D1F was a demonstration of leadership.
Dr Bawumia said former President Mahama “should come out and tell us exactly what he will do because the visionary President Akufo-Addo said he will do it and he has done it.”
According to Dr Bawumia, former President Mahama was “clueless and had not told us what he will do because I know he does not know what he will do that is the simple answer.
“I am 100 per cent certain that if John Mahama was in office today, Ghana will not have free SHS neither will we have the teacher trainee allowance, nurse trainee allowance, the paperless port and also the 1D1F.
“It takes visionary leadership and courage and this is what we are seeing with President Akufo-Addo,” he said.
According to the Vice-President, one of the things which facilitated the double track process was the innovative introduction of the double track system which we did because it was critical for the country.
He said former President Mahama had no clue about what he was going to do, otherwise he would come out with it since 2012.
Dr Bawumia said the same vision by President Akufo-Addo which led to the construction of 181 factories across the country was the same vision which propelled the beginning of the free SHS policy.
The Vice-President said if President Akufo-Addo had not forecasted to start the 1D1F, the country would not have had that number of 1D1F which was creating all those jobs.
“It is the same vision that President Akufo-Addo had when he said we are going to do free SHS in this country.
There were many naysayers when we said we will do free SHS, including the former President Mahama, who said it was a gimmick, a misplaced priority at the time.
“Some even said it will take 20 years to do free SHS, but President Akufo-Addo had a vision and he persisted with it against all the naysayers and he implemented the free SHS education in his very first year of government,” he said.
Today, he said, thanks to the introduction of the free SHS an additional 180,000 students had had the opportunity to be in school and by the end of September this year all the three streams of SHS would be benefitting from free SHS education.