Free SHS Has the Same Underlying Concept and Expenditure as Our Low-Premium NHIS

If we were to go by the same logic, The Asantehene, His Majesty, Otumfuo Osei-Tutu, II, ought to be calling for a thorough review and/or the complete dissolution of the Akufo-Addo-resuscitated John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-implemented low-premium National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), because the country lacks adequate fiscal resources to guarantee a comprehensive health coverage for each and every citizen, irrespective of class status or economic prowess or the abject lack thereof, for that matter.

Making those who have the means to pay for the public education of their children, grandchildren, wards and relatives pay for the same, ought to also have been made integral to the implementation and the administration of the National Health Insurance Scheme. Unfortunately, it well appears that our power-giddy politicians had allowed the cheap and facile accessing of elected public office blind them to the practical realities on the ground. You see, it was unarguably clear right from the very beginning that the country woefully lacked adequate resources to guarantee a comprehensive coverage for such specialized healthcare services as dialysis and glaucoma, among dozens of other kinds of ailments for which our largely generalist physicians are not trained to effectively tackle (See “Cancel or Review Free SHS if Students Cannot Be Fed or Accommodated - Otumfuo” Ghanaweb.com 3/17/25).

Plus, what is more, even as Prof. Agyeman-Badu Akosa recently had occasion to publicly decry, it is an open secret that influential and prominent Ghanaian citizens, including Otumfuo Osei-Tutu, II, have cultivated the routine habit of jetting out of the country to seek comprehensive medical checkups and treatments in such technologically advanced countries like the United States of America, South Africa, Germany, France, Canada, Australia and Great Britain.

There can, of course, be absolutely no gainsaying that there is an imperative need for the Akufo-Addo-implemented Universally Fee-Free Senior High School System to be thoroughly reviewed and made affordable for each and every able-bodied and intellectually and vocationally qualified Ghanaian youth, and not simply make it unjustifiably exclusive to the parents of our teens who can afford the same, especially with regard to the rooming or boarding and the feeding or dining facilities and the ready availability of provender or food resources for our children, grandchildren and wards, as The Asantehene is widely reported by the media to have recently told Mr. Haruna Iddrisu, the current President John “Don’t Criticize Me Because You Have Never Been Elected President” Dramani Mahama-appointed Education Minister, during a courtesy call on Barima Kwaku Duah at his Manhyia Palace recently.

In an Equal-Opportunity Oriented Society such as Ghanaians have been attempting to build since Independence, when President Kwame Nkrumah and his Convention People’s Party (CPP) Government established a Universally Fee-Free Elementary and Middle School System, the idea of making our public education system “class conscious” regime of wealth-based accessibility has been deemed to be unreservedly antithetical to the kind of a “Welfarist Society” which Ghanaians inherited from the erstwhile British Colonial Government.

Of course, times have significantly changed from Ghana as a very small country with a population of some five- or six-million citizens to a postcolonial mid-sized country with a present-day population of approximately 35-million people. It therefore goes without saying that just about the only thing that has not significantly undergone any remarkable and/or progressive change is the abjectly poor caliber of leadership with which our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana has been saddled. Need I or anybody else, for that matter, remind my fellow Ghanaians that our leadership has gotten steadily and, in some cases, precipitously worse than we had all anticipated at Independence?

In short, the level of official corruption and political criminality in the country is simply unspeakable, and it makes one wonder why as a nation, we are not even far worse than could be imagined. Had he been studiously following events on Ground Zero, as it were, Otumfuo Osei-Tutu would already be well aware of the fact that some of us have for quite a considerable while now observed the all too unarguable fact that the increasingly fiscally prohibitive boarding school system which, very likely, he himself once attended as a teenager and a young man, is decidedly a relic of history. It worked in the past because the country’s school-age population was much lower and much easier to maintain in terms of economies of scale.

Today, with the widespread availability of technology and an exponentially increased population size, access to a qualitative education is much easier and much more affordable. Now, what the preceding means is that such hitherto elite and missionary established “Magnet Schools” as Okwawu-Nkwatia’s St. Peter’s Secondary School - aka PERSCO - Mfantsipim, Wesley Girls’, Legon-PRESEC and Prempeh College, to name only a handful, are no longer the exclusive and the rarefied citadels of the future cream of Ghanaian society that they had once been about a generation or two ago. Which is on account of it where and why one would unreservedly agree with Nana Osei-Tutu that a reviewed and/or a revised Universally Fee-Free Senior High School System needs to progressively divorce the increasingly burdensome boarding school system by making it a matter of choice squarely predicated on parental and guardianship affordability.

You see, in even the most economically and technologically advanced countries like Canada, The Netherlands, The United States of America, France, Germany and Great Britain, the overwhelming majority of the traditionally elite Senior High Schools are Commuter or Day Schools, such as the globally renowned Bronx, New York, High School of Science, University Heights High School, also in Bronx, New York, which this author’s elder son attended, and the Brooklyn, New York, Technology High School, to name only a couple of the most obvious to the author.

Ultimately, however, what needs to be emphasized here, more than anything else, is the patently pedestrian fact that when it comes to feeding and clothing our high school attending children, grandchildren, relatives and wards, the onus of responsibility squarely lies with parents and guardians, and not the government of the day, as it weirdly seems to have become the mantra of some reckless and morally irresponsible baby-pumping adult-Ghanaian citizens these days. There is a good, wise old saying that Yours Truly grew up with which runs as follows: “The one who gave birth to you did not suffer even half as much as the one who raised you, kid.”

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
March 18, 2025
E-mail: [email protected]