NDC Has a Minister of Education Whose MS in Sociology Degree Was Revoked by Legon

To add insult to injury, as the trite and jaded saying goes, in the wake of the disciplinary revocation of the Master of Sociology Degree unethically earned by Mr. Haruna Iddrisu, about a couple of years after the academically dishonest culprit had graduated from the Main Legon Campus of the country’s oldest and foremost flagship academy, the University of Ghana, the then Deputy Minister in the government of the late President John Evans “Atta-Woyome” Mills, himself a former faculty member of the same institutional establishment, was promptly and contemptuously promoted to the rank of a substantive cabinet portfolio as a senior minister, obviously in a nosethumbing gesture at the Academic Council of Legon, as the University of Ghana is popularly known all over the world.

There were, of course, several problems here, not the least bit of which was the undeniably curious fact that it had taken the Legon Academic Council so unusually long - that is, at least two to three years - to figure out the morally and the professionally embarrassing realization of having awarded a graduate degree in Sociology to a student who had largely and academically untenably and literally plagiarized his way right out of the country’s oldest and most prestigious citadel of the best and the brightest not only in Ghanaian society but, indeed, one of the most prestigious and reputable tertiary academies on the entire African Continent.

Equally depressing and perhaps even more insulting to the intelligence of the Ghanaian people and the image and the reputation of the nation at large, was the fact that President Mills, who had so flagrantly dared to cavalierly and peevishly thumb his nose at the Academic Council at the University of Ghana, as already hinted in the preceding paragraphs, was himself an alumnus and a former senior professor on the faculty of the University of Ghana Law School, then called the Faculty of Law, and may very well have been a bona fide member of the University’s Academic Council at one time or another.

You see, contrary to what Dr. Yaw Osei-Adutwum, unarguably Ghana’s most dedicated, dynamic, innovative and progressive Education Minister, over at least some two generations, would have himself and the rest of his colleagues on the Parliamentary Education Committee and, indeed, the rest of his countrymen and countrywomen believe, the crux of the problem is not merely the grim fact of the leadership of the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress’ seeming to be deliberately and/or criminally apathetic and unconscionably hellbent on reversing the formidable and the laudable gains notched in the sector of the nation’s public education system by the previous twice, consecutively elected New Patriotic Party-sponsored government of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

Rather, it is simply that as both an institutional establishment and individual members of the latter architectural configuration, the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress have absolutely no remarkable and/or reputable track record of significantly improving the level and the quality of public education in Ghana, beginning with the unduly protracted tenure of the late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led junta regime of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) - (1981-1992).

The present writer concerningly recognized this historically unarguable fact, well beforehand, on the eve of the exit of the previous Akufo-Addo Administration, thus his solemn call to the incoming Mahama regime to wisely, humbly and patriotically reach out to Dr. Yaw Osei-Adutwum and to seriously consider engaging the nationally unrivalled expert services of Ghana’s most innovative and progressive legendary Educator and Education Minister, since the epoch-making career of the globally canonized and immortalized Dr. James Emmanuel Kwegyir Aggrey (1875-1927), to ensure that the positive pivoting in the quality of Ghana’s Fourth Republican Public Education System will be stabilized, even if not significantly further improved.

It is also rather much too late in the game, as it were, for the New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for the Bosomtwe Constituency, in the Asante Region, to be calling on the Galamsey-fixated Mahama government to ensure that it “maintains the gains that it inherited in the public education sector” from the previous Akufo-Addo Administration. Our Akan sages of yore are often credited with having perspicuously observed that the symptoms or the hallmarks of any good market day can be espied right at the break of dawn.

The well-anticipated snatching and the cannibalizing of the post-election ballot boxes by the leadership the Mahama-chaperoned National Democratic Congress, was the only surefire means of having The Yagbonwura, Tumtumba Kwame Gonja, force his way back into Ghana’s Presidential Palace, Jubilee House, by literally riding shotgun, as globally witnessed on television and social media, as well as radio news reports, besides the rabble-rousing Messrs. Samuel “Sammy” Gyamfi and Johnson “The Bui Dam Woyome” Asiedu-Nketia, a dastardly treasonable act that was not the least bit reflective of the character of any political party leadership confident and self-assured of winning the 2024 General Election fair and square.

Rather, the preceding act of primitive and heinous criminality was a sinister reflection of events to come. And, of course, the unspeakably criminal and socioeconomic and politically regressive “resetting” of the clock of the development of Ghana’s public education is only one of the most striking examples of the relentless and the inexorable determination of the Gonja and the Trokosi Micro-Nationalist Mafia to literally return Ghana to the Paleolithic Age of “Spearchucking” Darwinian State-of-Nature Warfare, a war and a battle which they cannot win in the long run.

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