Former President John Mahama has bemoaned the Akufo-Addo government’s inability to complete some community day schools the erstwhile National Democratic Congress (NDC) government initiated to help absorb more students into senior high schools (SHSs).
The school blocks were commenced across the country to cater for the infrastructural deficits in the country’s SHSs while the government rolled out the ‘progressively free senior high school policy’. However, the Mahama-led government lost the 2016 elections, stalling most of the projects.
The Ministry for Education under the leadership of Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh announced that the Akufo-Addo government had completed some of the school projects bequeathed to them in 2017.
Some of the abandoned E-Block
But Mahama, who is touring the Western Region to thank Ghanaians for their overwhelming support during the 2020 polls, believes the government has not done enough to finish the projects and get students in SHS to study comfortably.
Speaking in an interview on Bogoso-based Trinity FM, Mr Mahama indicated that the completion of the E-Blocks would have saved the government from running the double-track system.
“Everything you’ll do, you have to apply wisdom. To start the free SHS, you have to know that when you open the gates like that, the children will be many and that means you have to make provisions for the students before opening the gates,” the 2020 NDC Presidential candidate said in Akan.
lamenting the development, he said the failure to complete the E-Blocks has become “a waste of taxpayers’ money”, adding that the government has left the projects unattended to and is embarking on different projects.
“Today some of the schools have been left unattended. If they were operational, there wouldn’t be this double track,” Mahama added. “Because of this, the quality of education is declining and that is why the children want to rely on ‘apor’ (exam leakages) before going to the examination centre.”
He continued, “We have heard how students got angry after their final exams and went on rampage, attacking teachers because they did not allow them to engage in examination malpractices.”
To him, “if the quality of education in the second-cycle institutions is good and you train the children well, we won’t be seeing all these.”
Source: Mynewsghana