Mahama Should Steer Clear of the Public Universities Bill

Other than constantly badmouthing progressive and visionary policies rolled out by the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Candidate John Dramani Mahama ought to have some shame and promptly apologize for rendering Ghanaian public universities research and teaching deficient (See “University Bill: Mahama Must Seek to Be Educated Before Speaking – NAPO” DailyGuideNetwork.com / Ghanaweb.com 6/17/20). The Public Universities Bill has already passed with the resonant approval of Parliament and the legitimately elected representatives of the Ghanaian people, so I will not waste time belaboring the same subject here, other than to highlight the fact that creating cheap and vacuous propaganda spiel out of the same is highly unlikely to reap the former President any “Brownie Points,” as Americans are wont to say.

From the little that I read in the recent past about the Public Universities Bill, now the Public Universities Law, I suppose, the latter aims at streamlining and consolidating the way that our taxpayer-underwritten tertiary academies function in order to significantly reduce the chaotic and atomistic manner in which these public brain-trust establishments had operated in the past, which had not redounded to the maximum benefit of the people and the society for whose well-being these tertiary academies were primarily established to serve and advance. But what is even more ironic and preposterous is the fact that under the previous Mahama-led regime of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), these very universities which a shamelessly opportunistic Candidate Mahama is now claiming to be greatly interested in protecting in the critical area of Academic Freedom, had their Faculty Book and Research Allowances summarily scrapped by Mr. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa, the Mahama-appointed Deputy Minister-in-Charge of Tertiary Education.

You see, rather than vacuously grandstand and pontificate over an issue and subject over which he has absolutely no enviable record, Candidate Mahama ought to be explaining to the Ghanaian citizenry and eligible voters precisely how he fathoms himself to be a progressive advocate for the nation’s higher education, when during the four-and-half years of his Presidency, Mr. Mahama actually set back the academic and professional freedom of our best brains by scrapping the faculty Book and Research Allowances that, we are reliably informed, was established by the John Agyekum-Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party. Under his tenure, not only has our current President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, healthily and progressively restored the Faculty Book and Research Allowances, Nana Akufo-Addo, directly acting through his dynamic and equally progressive Minister of Education, Dr. Matthew Opoku-Prempeh, has also exponentially increased the funding amount per head or each faculty by 200-percent, from the GHȻ 500 originally allocated per head by former President John Agyekum-Kufuor, to a whopping GHȻ 1,500 under the Golden-Age tenure of Nana Akufo-Addo.

Of course, we need to also factor in the steadily rising trajectory of inflation, which was exceptionally high under the previous Mahama regime. Even so, the present situation is much more academically enhancing than the criminal and barbaric Social Darwinian Mahama-established carcinogenic policy of robbing our hard-working but resource-famished university lecturers and professors to line the pockets and bank accounts of the double-salary scamming Mahama cabinet members and executive appointees. The scandalous and summary withdrawal of the professional trainee allowances by the previous Mahama regime, notable among the latter, the Nurse- and Teacher-Trainee Allowances, ought to studiously inform Ghanaian voters and citizens of the fact that the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress has absolutely nothing meaningful and materially progressive for the development of our beloved and only land of birth, to wit, the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana.

Indeed, even as Nana Akufo-Addo recently had occasion to remind Ghanaians, once more, the government of the New Patriotic Party is inescapably about the missionary business of building up and maintaining the relatively prosperous and higher standard of living of the proverbial average Ghanaian, whereas the leaders of the National Democratic Congress are hell-bent on destroying the economic success story of Ghana by recklessly and criminally flooding our country with parasitic foreigners who are scandalously informed by the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress that ours is a free-for-all economic bonanza. In other words, patriotism is the last thing on the minds of political “Ajangudas,” or highway robber-barons like Candidate John Dramani Mahama.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

July 3, 2020

E-mail: [email protected]