Who Is Clueless Here? Nii Armah Addy or Dr. Yaw Osei-Adutwum?

I resent this routinely disingenuous response by the political opposition, especially members of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), whenever the very high possibility of the cancellation of the Akufo-Addo-implemented Fee-Free Senior High School System (Free-SHS) by the Mahama-led Posse of the latter political establishment is raised or foregrounded in any education-related policy debate in the country. Almost invariably, the tendency on the part of the leadership of the National Democratic Congress has been to glibly point to the fact of the existence of Article 25 of Ghana’s 1992 Constitution, which mandates the establishment of a Fee-Free Senior High School System.

Now, what these disingenuous and cynical, mostly NDC, critics conveniently ignore to significantly add is that such mandate is squarely predicated on the availability of funding or adequate fiscal resources for the establishment of a Fee-Free Senior High School System. Now, if , indeed, it was really the case that absolutely no fiscal conditionalities and/or stipulations were attached to the establishment or the implementation of a Fee-Free Senior High School System, as Mr. Nii Armah Addy cavalierly claims, why then did it or should it have taken at least 25 years, upon the coming into full force of Ghana’s 1992 Republican Constitution before a determined and a hard-driving President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo got the prime opportunity and the rare privilege to heroically implement the Fee-Free Senior High School System?

In other words, why had the Fee-Free SHS System not been implemented well ahead of or long before by any of the four preceding Fourth-Republican governments, three of them National Democratic Congress-sponsored regimes, until Nana Akufo-Addo and his New Patriotic Party government were seismically swept into Jubilee House in the December 2016 General Election? Which is why it comes as absolutely nothing short of the patently absurd to hear Mr. Nii Armah Addy, described by the media as an “Educationist” or an “Educator,” virulently and intemperately accuse Dr. Yaw Osei-Adutwum of being “clueless” and/or seeking to score “cheap political points” because the Akufo-Addo-appointed Education Minister has been seeking parliamentary approval to legislatively or statutorily entrench the implementation of the Fee-Free Senior High, Vocational, Technical and STEM Curricula Education System into law before it gets criminally scrapped by a near-future National Democratic Congress’ regime that may be equally determined to unconscionably re-augment the rate and the magnitude of functional illiteracy among Ghanaian youths, as had been the case with the previous three National Democratic Congress-sponsored governments of Ghana’s Fourth Republic, namely, the Rawlings, Atta-Mills and the Mahama regimes (See “Free SHS review: Dr. Adutwum clueless - Educationist” Modernghana.com 7/2/24).

On the latter count must also be herein categorically put on record the fact that as President Mr. John “Ouagadougou-Nkonfem Flying” Dramani Mahama had pontifically asserted that a Fee-Free Senior High School Education System could at the earliest only be brought to fruition or practical realization at least twenty years from now. It is his kind of bold and visionary leadership genius that easily and clearly distinguishes the legendary Leprechaun of Akyem-Abomosu and Kyebi from the vision-bereft and patent political pedestrian that is the Bole-Bamboi-born native from the West-Gonja Constituency of the Alufo-Addo-created Savannah Region.

Candidate-General John “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama also appears to believe that his most important national-development agenda, and one for which he ought to be heartily congratulated and celebrated for its unprecedented genius and ingenuity, is for Ghanaian voters to vote, come December 7, 2024, overwhelmingly, to return him to Jubilee House, so that “He could correct his past mistakes.” He has not yet told Ghanaians which of those legion past mistakes he intends to correct, much less those that as an all-too-fallible human being, he is apt to make in the process. So, it ought to come as very obvious that Yagbonwura Okogufuo Kwame Gonja cannot be taken even half seriously.

Now, while we are still at it, that is, on the very same subject or topic, we also need to significantly add that some New Patriotic Party stalwarts, for obviously self-interested reasons, have also vehemently kicked against the very progressive and the auspicious implementation of the Fee-Free Senior High School System, foremost among them Dr. Kwame Addo-Kufuor, the immediate younger brother of former President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor and, subsequently, Prof. Ivan Addae-Mensah, the internationally renowned Ghanaian chemist and former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana; and then, Prof. Ernest Aryeetey, the internationally renowned economist and self-described Kumasi-born former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana; and, finally, but scarcely the last, Prof. Stephen Adei, also an internationally renowned economist and retired Rector or Director of the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA) and, prior to the latter post, a Regional Director of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) for Southern Africa.

The obvious submission here is that the implementation and the establishment of the Akufo-Addo and the Yaw Osei-Adutwum-implemented Fee-Free Senior High, Vocational, Technical and STEM Curricula Education System cannot be taken for granted. Equally worth noting is the total collapsing and the effective bankrupting of the Agyekum-Kufuor-established National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), by the previous National Democratic Congress-sponsored Mahama regime, into which the then newly elected President Akufo-Addo had to literally sink at least $2 billion (USD) to resuscitate and make viable again. That is the true meaning of a Mahama electioneering-campaign promise.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
July 4, 2025
E-mail: [email protected]