The Teong Primary School Contretemps

It is not the sort of national contretemps or shame and embarrassment that you may be thinking about, because prior to the assumption of the democratic reins of governance by the present Akufo-Addo Administration, the so-called social democratically oriented and self-proclaimed poor-people’s party, namely, the Jerry John Rawlings-founded National Democratic Congress (NDC), had been at the helm of our national affairs for 8 years or two consecutive 4-year terms. Which is simply to imply that it is not as if prominent and powerful NDC operatives like Messrs. Mahama Ayariga and Clement Apaak, for only two of the most striking examples, were not aware of the village or township of Teong, right inside their home turf and region.

So, I was not quite as emotionally and psychologically moved or staggered by the horrible learning condition of the pupils of the Teong Primary School in the same manner that Mr. Douglas Chartey, author of the article titled “The Bedrock of a Nation’s Development Depends on the Footing of Its Children” (Modernghana.com 4/18/21) appears to have been. Well, Teong, for those of our readers who may not readily recognize the names of Messrs. Ayariga and Apaak, is in the Upper-East Region. Now, I am not quite moved to tears, as Mr. Chartey appears to have been, although I have seen the same GH One News clip on which the writer clearly based his column, with the children sitting in the sand, on bare and naked ground or earth, and writing in the raw sand with their fingers – talk of germs and uncut fingernails – as they earnestly look up to their female teacher standing right in front of them by a fairly big tree with what clearly appears to be a chalkboard on an easel before it.

My low-grade level of sympathy is actually a slow-burning anger squarely directed at the politicians representing or, more aptly, pretending to represent these “wretched” children in our National Assembly or Parliament. Even more sharply focused upon is the fact that successive governments, beginning with the late Chairman Rawlings-led populist junta of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), the direct antecedent of the present-day National Democratic Congress (NDC), dominated Ghana’s political climate and culture for some two decades, during which protracted period veritable eyesores and national shames and embarrassments like the Teong Primary School apocalypse could have been thoroughly eradicated.

Instead, we have had the megalomaniacal likes of former President John Dramani Mahama fiercely resist the progressive and visionary implementation of the Fee-Free Senior High School Policy Initiative, while callously scamming Ghanaian taxpayers with his entitlement team of northern-descended Board Members of the so-called Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA), the same “dream team” of looters who shooed the taxpayer-purchased Guinea-Fowls or Nkonfem into the arid airspace and dusty skyline of the Burkinabe Republic in the name of “avian vacation.” I am also wondering how the Teong Middle School is apt to look like, that is, if even such an institution or establishment really exists.

In this column, however, what I want to highlight, more than anything else, is the need for all of our elected representatives, from the local assembly level to Parliament or our National Assembly, to be periodically quizzed and selected squarely on the basis of their ability to present their prospective constituents with comprehensively documented development plans, each and every one of them, prior to the conduct of all assembly and parliamentary primaries. If this were compulsorily done or demanded, we would be far more likely to elect candidates with intimate knowledge and avid political will and steely determination to ensure that our nation’s wealth and resources would reach every nook and cranny in the country, as the cliché goes. You see, Dear Reader, it is this woeful and abject lack of accountability that has produced national embarrassments and eyesores like the Teong Primary School.

To be sure, there are hundreds of thousands of Teong Primary Schools littered all over the country in virtually each and every one of the country’s 16 administrative regions. And, by the way, I also chanced upon another equally unsightly and morally deplorable learning environment very much like the one documented by the GH One television crew that Mr. Chartey bitterly complains about. This one came from the Ellembelle Constituency, in the Western Region, the same constituency that produced Ghana’s first post-independence leader, the legendary President Kwame Nkrumah and Mr. Emmanuel Armah Kofi Buah, the Petroleum Minister under the previous Mahama regime. And before the latter, of course, Mr. Freddie Blay, the current National Chairman of the ruling New Patriotic Party.

You see, pontifically listing a long chain or litany of UN Conventions to underscore the imperative need for all Ghanaian school-going-age pupils to be afforded equal access to modern education facilities will do us little good. What needs to happen, and promptly so, is our collective ability, as a nation, to staunchly hold each and every one of our leaders to account. This is what we, each and every one of us, appear to be woefully lacking.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

April 18, 2021

E-mail: [email protected]