If you live in Ghana or were monitoring the electioneering
events during our recent general elections, I am sure that you couldn’t have
missed out on one key message that resonated throughout the whole country among
a plethora of other campaign messages and slogans. This reverberating message was the issue of
free Senior High School(SHS) education.
Though all the political parties had
policies on education, almost all carried the same promise of free SHS with the
exception of the NDC who initially rejected the idea outright as being unachievable
yet were compelled to quickly recant their position after a sound bite of their
flag bearer making the same promise of free SHS to Ghanaians as far back as
2008 emerged. In their attempt to save
face and to mitigate their embarrassment, they grudgingly consented to the free
SHS concept but with an added twist that they intend to implement it gradually over
a certain time frame instead of its immediate implementation as proposed by the
NPP.
Anyway, I’ll like to briefly address some of the populace
objections that were leveled against the concept during the electioneering
period.
Objection
1: It’s a desperate political gimmick intended to get
NPP elected.
Well, it will appear so but not necessarily because,
the concept is constitutionally mandated yet previous governments have failed
to implement it whereas the NPP has identified our current educational need as
a country as being dire and therefore has expressed a clear and urgent call to
implement this policy now instead of some obscure future time! One may be suspect
about their timing and even deem it opportunistic…but why not? Now is a good
time as any other! It’s only that the NPP has made free SHS a matter of top
priority and therefore bring it up for discussion at any given opportunity and rightly
so!
Objection
2: There’s nothing free in this world. Therefore, ‘free’
SHS must be a hoax!
Well, I do agree that technically speaking, it’s not
going to be free. Someone will have to bear the cost somehow in which case the NPP
proposed that this cost must be borne by the government. So yes, to the government,
it’ll certainly not be ‘free’ but from the perspective of the recipient, it’s
certainly is free as the recipient is absolved from bearing the cost. It’s just
like a student gaining a full academic scholarship. To such a student, tuition
is free, but to the scholarship awarding institute, It’s certainly not free as
they’re going to have to bear the cost(and the full one at that) to cater for
the awardee. So here, I’ll simply summarize that it’s just a matter of perspectives!
Objection
3: It’ll cost too much so we cannot afford it.
This is the singular point which I deem as being
worthy of any serious attention. The NPP were not forthcoming on how they
intended to source funding for the implementation of the concept and this
became their Achilles heel on which their opponents quickly cashed in to
buttress their claim that the whole promise is one big gimmick. However, the
NPP’s reticent attitude then didn’t seem to be much of a problem for me as I considered
it a rather prudent act not divulging the nitty-gritty of how they intended to
implement the concept for fear of their idea being stolen by their opponent. Moreover,
I am assuming its implementation was most likely going to be on a pilot basis
first in order to ascertain unforeseen challenges before it would have been implemented
across the country.
Well, needless to say, the majority of Ghana’s
electorate preferred the cheesy slogan “edey be kerrkerrr” of the NDC to the NPP’s
“free SHS” which in my view is the more reason why we desperately need free SHS.
Though this discussion is rather belated, the matter
of quality and affordable education for all is timeless and deserve frank and
constructive discourse at anytime no matter which government is in power.
Long live Ghana!!
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