NDC Has a Minister of Education Whose MS in Sociology Degree Was Revoked by Legon

The story of the precipitous decline in the quality of public education in Ghana is nearly as ancient as Ghana’s postcolonial dispensation itself, with the riotously rampant and summary closure of schools and colleges anytime that students vehemently protested against oppressive socioeconomic conditions in the country, and the resulting deleterious impact on the living standards of high school and college students, especially those enrolled in the traditional room-and-board system, better known locally as boarding schools.

With the historic assumption of the postcolonial rein of governance by the Prime Minister, later President, Kwame Nkrumah-led government of the Convention People’s Party (CPP), the overwhelming majority of these former Western Missionary Schools, largely Christian in orientation, were absorbed into what became known as “Government-Assisted Schools,” which simply meant that the Central Government began to officially make major budgetary accommodation for these schools, primarily in the form of room-and-board and tuition-fees subvention and the issuance of scholarships and bursaries to academically and professionally eligible or deserving students.

As noted in the quite influential albeit dated synopsis of the political culture, climate and the general development of Ghana under Nkrumah’s leadership, titled Ghana: End of an Illusion, by the Marxist-Leninist scholars Robert Fitch and Mary Oppenheimer, subsuming the missionary/mission schools as part of the “New Ghana’s” public education policy and under the Ministry of Education, enabled the CPP Government to achieve several image-making and epoch-making goals and earn both the so-called Founding-Father of Ghana and his political party considerable “Brownie Points,” as it were, in the form of the widely exaggerated claim of the exponential increment or the inflation of the number of schools established from scratch by the Convention People’s Party, a dubious strategic phenomenon that Ghanaians also witnessed not very long ago under the Mills-Mahama and the Mahama 1.0 regime, when the government of the National Democratic Congress began to strategically and mischievously annex some preexisting tertiary academies, largely teacher-training college, by claiming the latter a bona fide part and parcel of the NDC’s national education policy agenda.

But what is even far more significant to underscore here is the brazen and the abject lack of respect for academic standards and the quality and the integrity of the country’s education system by the leadership of the erstwhile junta of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) and, presently, the faux-socialist National Democratic Congress. For starters, it was the leadership of the National Democratic Congress that appallingly and grossly ill-advisedly truncated or reduced the progressively reset four-year senior high school system, initiated under the Agyekum-Kufuor Administration, on capricious grounds of economic constraints and the imperative need to prioritize budgetary affordability over the quality of the country’s public school system.

At the time, as this author vividly and painfully recalls, it was a cabinet appointee in the government of the late President John Evans “Atta-Woyome” Mills in charge of the Ministry of Women, Children and Gender Affairs, by the name of Ms. Akua Sena Dansua, who smugly and cavalierly intimated to the general Ghanaian public that the foremost priority of the Atta-Mills-led government of the National Democratic Congress was to critically and studiously ensure that young women of nubile or marriageable age were timeously prepared and hurriedly shipped out of our public high school system, manufacturing assembly plant fashion, so as to find for themselves potential and prospective husbands and start making babies and creating families at the pleasure of their husbands or male spouses.

Which obviously and principally means that if he had been paying sedulous attention to the National Education Policy Plan of the Mills-Mahama and the Mahama/Amisaah-Arthur and, presently, the Mahama/Opoku-Agyemang-skippered ragtag regime of the National Democratic Congress, Dr. Yaw Osei-Aduwum, Ghana’s most innovative and dynamic Education Minister for at least a half century, would not have made the egregious mistake of supposing that the leadership of the National Democratic Congress was ever or had ever been interested in promoting or advancing qualitative public education in the country, much less maintaining the high benchmark of exemplary and qualitative education system bequeathed the Mahama 2.0 regime by the twice, consecutively elected Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party (See “2025 WASSCE Results: ‘NDC Is Retrogressively Resetting Education in Ghana’ - Minority” Modernghana.com 12/3/25).

The precipitous decline in the passing rate of our senior high school students, from a relatively impressive 67-percent in the 2023-24 Academic Year in the core subject of Mathematics, to a dismal 49-percent in the 2024-25 Academic Year, under the much-ballyhooed “Reset Agenda” of the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress, is absolutely no news to worry ourselves silly about, much less table the same up as a topical issue for national discursive consideration. Likewise, the exponential decline in the passing rate of students in Social Studies, from 72-percent, under the previous Akufo-Addo Administration, to the present oceanically catastrophic decline of 56-percent, under a supposedly “politically retooled and reinvigorated President-General Mahama,” is all the more to be expected.

More so, when one also reckons the fact that, presently, the topmost priority of Mr. Haruna Iddrisu, the Mahama pointman at the Ministry of Education, has almost squarely and exclusively to do with the way and the manner in which our young high school female students wear their hair. I would be damned, if the National Democratic Congress-sponsored Member of Parliament for Tamale-South Constituency, in the Northern Region, is not declared one of these days to have been clinically determined to be mentally unhinged or out of kilter by a board-certified psychiatrist or clinical psychologist anywhere in the “Civilized World.” And I mean, “The Civilized World!” Bisimllahi!

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