Prominent broadcast journalist Paul Adom-Otchere has praised President Akufo-Addo for using public funds to educate students, implying that this kind of action would be blessed by God.
He noted that previous presidents, including Atta-Mills, John Mahama, and John Agyekum Kufuor, had access to comparable resources during their terms in office in an editorial on his Good Evening Ghana show on Thursday night.
Adom-Otchere stressed, however, that it might be a praiseworthy use of public funds if President Akufo-Addo really used taxpayer money to educate over 1200 Ghanaians who might not have otherwise been able to afford education beyond junior high school.
“If he (President Akufo-Addo) had taken the tax payers money to do a lot of things, he could build roads, do this… President Mills, John Mahama had access to that, Kufuor to that,” he said.
“If it is true that he spends tax payers money and to educate over 120,000 Ghanaians who could not have afforded education, they just were going to go away after JHS, if he has used Ghanaians tax payers money, you and I our money because he decides what to do with the money, because he is president, if he has used some of that money to educate each year 120,000 people so that by the end of the eight years he had educated 1.2 million people, to give them literacy and numeracy skills at SHS, then God will bless him.”
If this educational endeavor is real, according to Paul Adom-Otchere, then God should grant blessings.
Around 2.5 million students in Ghana have benefited from the government’s Free Senior High School (SHS) and Technical and Vocational Education Training (TVET) programs since their implementation in September 2017, according to Deputy Minister of Education John Ntim Fordjour.
In a recent development, the government has resisted calls for an evaluation of its current policies, particularly the free SHS Policy, in spite of mounting pressure from experts and civil society organizations who favor a more resource-efficient strategy.
The aforementioned policy emerged as a pivotal issue in political campaigns, as National Democratic Congress (NDC) presidential candidate John Dramani Mahama attacked the Akufo-Addo government’s execution of it in the 2020 contest.
In addition to criticizing the current strategy, Mahama promised that if elected president, she would thoroughly review the policy.
In order to ensure the optimization of the policy, Mahama, the candidate for the NDC in the 2020 election, committed to starting the review within the first ninety days of taking office and to involving all pertinent parties.
