The Politics of a Free Desk: How Free SHS Became Ghana's Most Contested Policy Legacy

Few policies in Ghana's Fourth Republic have shaped electoral politics as decisively as the Free Senior High School (Free SHS) programme and few have been fought over with such persistence by both of the country's dominant parties. Nearly a decade after its rollout, Free SHS remains less a settled achievement than a live political battlefield, one where the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and National Democratic Congress (NDC) continue to contest not just its future, but its very origin story.

Competing Claims to Paternity
The dispute begins with the question of who actually started it. Nana Akufo-Addo campaigned on free secondary education as early as the NPP's 2012 manifesto, losing that election and the one in 2016 before finally rolling out Free SHS in September 2017, his first year in office.

But the NDC has long argued that credit belongs, at least partly, to former President John Mahama, who launched a smaller "Progressive Free SHS" scheme for day students roughly a year before Akufo-Addo's fuller version replaced it. Both parties have accused the other of "lying" about this history during election campaigns, turning even the policy's parentage into a recurring flashpoint rather than a settled fact.

The NPP's Ownership Era: 2017–2024

Once implemented, Free SHS became the NPP's signature social intervention and central campaign asset through two election cycles. The party's messaging consistently tied the policy to concrete enrollment gains Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia repeatedly cited a rise in national SHS enrollment from roughly 800,000 to 1.4 million students over seven years, with particular emphasis on the five northern regions, historically Ghana's poorest, which he credited with achieving the country's highest enrollment rates as a direct result of the policy.

The NPP's political strategy around Free SHS had two consistent pillars. First, it treated any NDC talk of "reviewing" the policy as equivalent to threatening to cancel it outright, a framing Akufo-Addo and Bawumia deployed heavily in both the 2020 and 2024 elections. Second, it challenged Mahama and the NDC to produce a concrete alternative to the "double-track" system the school-calendar rotation introduced to manage overcrowding using the argument, as Bawumia put it, that a church with insufficient seating runs multiple services rather than turning worshippers away. NPP officials, including Bawumia's 2024 running mate Matthew Opoku Prempeh, also revived older Mahama remarks that appeared skeptical of the policy's feasibility, arguing he had no standing to later claim credit for something he had once ridiculed.

The NDC's Long Repositioning
For its part, the NDC spent years walking a careful line: acknowledging Free SHS's political popularity while insisting it needed structural reform. Mahama's consistent position dating back to at least 2018 was that he would not scrap the policy but would convene a stakeholder consultation with parents, teachers, and education experts to fix its implementation problems, particularly overcrowding, inadequate infrastructure, and delayed disbursement of funds to schools. By the 2024 campaign, that position had hardened into an unambiguous guarantee.

Mahama repeatedly told audiences that Free SHS was "here to stay," framing it as constitutionally underpinned by Ghana's 1992 constitution and therefore irreversible by any administration, while campaign surrogates such as Edward Omane Boamah promised a dedicated funding source to phase out the double-track system, improve food quality, and decentralize school food procurement toward local farmers.

Governing the Policy: The NDC in Office Since 2025

Since Mahama's return to the presidency following his decisive December 2024 election victory, the NDC's approach to Free SHS has shifted from defending a promise to defending a record. The government's central move has been fiscal: Finance Minister Cassiel Ato Forson announced in the March 2025 budget that the administration was uncapping the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund), removing a longstanding statutory ceiling that had constrained how much of the fund could be directed to Free SHS.

This freed up an additional GH¢4.1 billion on top of a GH¢3.5 billion direct budget allocation, bringing total Free SHS-related funding to roughly GH¢7.6 billion for 2025 which the government has repeatedly described as the highest allocation in the programme's history.

By late 2025, Education Minister Haruna Iddrisu indicated the government intended to shift the GETFund toward financing all Free SHS-related expenditure going forward, at an estimated annual cost of around GH¢5 billion, effectively repurposing a fund whose traditional mandate had been broader tertiary and infrastructure financing.

President Mahama has used this funding record as his central rebuttal to years of NPP messaging that painted him as an opponent of the policy, declaring at a September 2025 media encounter that Free SHS had "not only been maintained" but "significantly strengthened" under his government. NDC surrogates such as MP Kwame Governs Agbodza and academic-turned-politician Dr. Clement Apaak have echoed this, arguing that record funding levels prove that "review" was never a euphemism for cancellation, as the NPP had long warned voters.

What the Fight Reveals
The persistence of this argument now approaching its second decade says as much about Ghana's political culture as it does about education policy. Free SHS has become a rare point of bipartisan consensus on substance (neither party seriously proposes ending free access to secondary education) combined with maximal partisan conflict over narrative (who deserves credit, who threatened it, who is managing it better).

That combination makes it an unusually durable campaign weapon: because reversing it is politically unthinkable for either party, the debate has permanently shifted from "should this exist" to "who is the more trustworthy steward of it" a fight over competence and sincerity rather than principle.

For ordinary Ghanaian families, the practical stakes are more concrete than the political theatre suggests: whether double-track scheduling finally ends, whether school meals improve, and whether GETFund's redirection toward Free SHS crowds out other education and infrastructure priorities the fund was originally built to serve.

Those questions, rather than the argument over paternity, are likely to determine how the next election cycle judges the policy's stewardship.

Mustapha Bature Sallama
Medical/ Science Communicator,
Private Investigator, Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Analysis,

International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding. ( USIP)

[email protected]
+233555275880

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