Restoring nursing allowances just politics – Casely-Hayford

Financial analyst, Sydney Casely-Hayford, has described government's decision to pay an abated allowance for trainee nurses as a political move to win over votes ahead of the polls in December.

According to him, the move doesn’t make financial sense as the government was currently struggling to make payments in other areas.

“You can see that the nursing trainee thing is clearly just politics. It's politics. Government doesn’t have the money but it wants to insist that it can find the money to do things,” he said on Citi FM's news analysis programme, The Big Issue.

He believes that the payment of the allowances will not be sustainable and will eventually be scrapped again or result in more ‘killer’ taxes for Ghanaians.

“If government will prolong this for a time and later on, it will come back and change its decision and reverse it or else we are going to be faced with additional taxes in order to meet these kind of burdens,” Casely-Hayford said.

‘Scraped’ allowances to be restored

A technical committee set up by the President to review allowances for nursing trainees, on Thursday recommended payment of an abated allowance with a possibility to migrate them unto the Students Loan Scheme.

The allowances had initially been scrapped in order to improve admission  into the various training institutions by removing the restrictions on admissions due to the huge amount paid on allowances.

The trainees widely opposed the move leading to the setting up of the committee to assess the situation and advise on the way forward.

The Committeee recommended that the 34,500 students in the health professional training across the country will receive a payment of GHc 150 a month.

The statement said “the payment amount would serve as a bridging mechanism pending the amendment of the Students Loan Trust Act, to enable students in non-tertiary health training institutions access loans to support education.”

Political gimmick
Boakye Agyarko, the policy adviser of the NPP flagbearer, Nana Akufo Addo, said the decision to restore the allowances was unsurprising with about four months to go to the polls.

According to him, this move showed that the government is clearly growing increasingly desperate to win over voters.

“How come that Asiedu Nketiah has been rubbishing the payment of student allowance? Now a president who has signed an IMF agreement to tighten the belts on the national purse and keeps on reminding the nation that under no circumstance will he allow budget overruns and then suddenly for political gains, does a U-turn through a very obscure statement. It's a pure political gimmick and I don't believe that anything will come out of it,” Boakye Agyarko said on Eyewitness News last week.

By: Edwin Kwakofi/citifmonline.com/Ghana