Nana Akufo Addo’s Free SHS Policy Is Ghana’s Finest And Most Strategic In Recent Times

Formal education has taken center stage in the development of Ghana both as a means of providing skilled manpower to the various sectors of the public service and as a means of securing decent living for many individuals.

It is on this account that the poverty gap has continued to widen beyond measure between educated public sector workers and non-educated subsistence farmers in the country. Also, it is this same reason that accounts for the recent advancements witnessed by the nations in southern and southeastern Asia and many others in Africa and the Caribbean.

In Ghana, it has been concluded that the provision of education to all Ghanaians should be without any limitations hence the Free Compulsory and Universal Basic Education as provided for in Article 38 (2) of the 1992 constitution. This constitutional provision is to ensure that no child in Ghana will come to be limited from enjoying formal education.

In order to realize this vision, many conditions were provided to entice children especially from poor homes to seek time in the classroom among which were the Food for Peace program secured from the United States government and the most recent School Feeding Program. Also, attempts are made to remove all financial barriers with the cancellation of school fees at the basic level and the most recent introduction of capitation grants.

Article 25 (1) (b) envisioned a nation in which access to secondary education in its different forms including technical and vocational education by all Ghanaians is without limitations coupled with a progressive introduction of free education.

Many years down the line, an assessment of access to education in Ghana whether basic or secondary will reveal significant obstacles including financial. Many of the reforms as in 1987 and 2007 have targeted the curricula and the duration of the various divisions or levels without due consideration of the access equation.

Many governments have taken to a game of attracting a measure of attention by providing their own version of syllabi which has no content differentiations from others as well as changing or reversing the number of years spent at the secondary level.

One consensus though is the fact that education remains an overall important tool to equipping the human resource of the country for development and as such, access is vital as well as germane. What remains the nation’s biggest concern is how to define access and by what means it could be measured.

During the 2008 and 2012 Presidential election campaigns, the presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party, Nana Akufo Addo, embarked on a campaign that will not only shake the foundations of political campaigns in the history of the country but will seek in a unique way to define what it means to provide access to secondary education.

He did it quiet simply and in line with the vision of the founding fathers of this country by proposing a policy to provide Free Senior High School Education for every Ghanaian child. This policy proposal to the people of Ghana came on the back of severe challenges to the provision of education at the secondary level where feeding grants to Assisted Secondary Schools in the three northern regions were irregular and school fees for Non-Assisted Secondary Schools in the southern sector continued to impose significant burden. Coupled with this was the imminent introduction of over-burdensome levies by heads of Secondary Schools on mostly non-existent facilities further increasing the cost of education.

According to Article 25 (1) (b) of the 1992 constitution, “secondary education in its different forms, including technical and vocational education, shall be made generally available and accessible to all by every appropriate means, and in particular, by the progressive introduction of free education”. This provision provided a leeway of opportunity for people in the opposition to critically analyze the Free SHS mantra of Nana Akufo Addo in the heat of the campaigns.

However they did it is inconsequential as what the Article provided is more than clear for every person to understand. The option that then President John Mahama chose to provide access was by creating available space to contain more students in the available secondary schools without considering that schools that have the space to admit bigger numbers of students do not admit for free.

However, the option Nana Akufo Addo chose to provide that access was by initiating a policy of Free Senior High School Education. It was an option that will fulfill the constitutional provision of providing available and accessible secondary education to all Ghanaian children, empower the next generation of Ghanaians for a transformation of the economy as well as a policy to bring relief to struggling families by pulling the breaks on the jaws of poverty.

First, the constitution provided for the establishment of a National Health Insurance Scheme within ten years of the coming into force of the 1992 constitution. In line with this, the administration of John Kufuor ensured that such a requirement was fulfilled when it rolled out the National Health Insurance Scheme amidst tensed opposition from the main opposition National Democratic Congress. It is of no doubt to Ghanaians how important the scheme affects the lives of ordinary Ghanaians who struggled many years under the Cash-and-Carry system. Even though active membership of the scheme has dropped to not more than 30% of the total population in recent times, it has received a global acclaim and many African countries are making Ghana their basic reference point in their efforts to install their own versions of health insurance.

In a similar way, the introduction of Free Senior High School Education will fulfill the dreams of the drafters of the constitution who reckoned the need for free education at the secondary level sometime in the future of the nation. The difficulty with initiating such a policy is not far-fetched because no timelines have been indicated in the constitution to its introduction just as the health insurance policy which was even opposed vehemently despite the clear timelines provided for it under the constitution.

Therefore, a policy as basic and simultaneously ambitious as Free Senior High School Education needs strong courage and commitment from a radical leader who has the mental strength to defy all odds for the sake of the long term strategic development priorities of his country. This is the mettle that Nana Akufo Addo proves to have and even more.

Secondly, the decision to embark on a policy to provide Free Senior High School Education to all Ghanaian children is not one out of the vacuum space but a well thought decision to provide the human resource requirement for the subsequent introduction of a marshal plan to transform the nation. In the New Patriotic Party’s 2012 manifesto, a crucial reason for the introduction of Free Senior High School Education is stated as: “The current state of our education is simply not acceptable. It is saddled with lack of access, deplorable quality and limited relevance to the job market. Unless we seriously tackle these problems, we will not achieve the requisite critical mass of high quality human resources to facilitate our transformation program”.

In this regard, the FREE SHS program was to be the axe that digs the gold in a Nana Akufo Addo administration. The success stories of the Asian dragons of Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong are not without reference to a mass of well-trained human resource. The story of the advanced nations of the United States, Great Britain, Russia and China is not associated with an iota of illiteracy but intertwined with huge strides and advances in educational literacy attained by conscious efforts at providing accessible education.

In this sense, if one is no stranger to the believe of Nana Akufo Addo in the possibilities of Ghana, one will come to agree that the FREE SHS was not a political game plan to win an election and ascend to the Presidency but a sacrifice he intended to make to fulfill that believe of taking Ghana at par with the advanced nations. Anyway, if it were a political game plan to win the election, it could have been abandoned when it failed to deliver him such a victory in 2008; but as he puts it clearly, “important foods are prepared in important pots” and every serious person will wait no matter how long it takes to get that food ready.

The final reason why I think Nana Akufo Addo’s Free Senior High School Education policy remains the finest and most strategic is its potency of ending the struggles of poor families in getting secondary education for their wards as well as ending poverty. In northern Ghana where some schools are under the cover of government assistance, school fees are lowest as compared to the majority of schools in the southern sector that do not receive assistance from government. What this means is that secondary education for most people in the northern part of Ghana are more affordable. This is not the case as numerous levies are usually imposed on students to the point of increasing the burdens families have to endure in securing funds for such levies.

In the 2004/2005 academic year, my parents paid 31 Cedis and 60 Pesewas for my admission into one of the Assisted Secondary Schools in the country in the form of levies. In the 2013/2014 academic year, parents had to pay over 600 Ghana Cedis to secure admission for their wards implying an increase of over 1,500% in just nine years. What this means is that in the next ten years and by this analysis, parents in the Assisted Secondary Schools will have to pay over 9,000 Ghana Cedis in levies for their wards admissions if all things remain equal.

The question is how many families can afford this amount to send their children to secondary schools even if the space in infrastructure is provided; and how many will miss out on secondary education because they cannot afford? However, making it free to educate our children at the secondary level will spare parents these colossal amounts of money which they can use to assist their wards in many other ways as well as providing meaningful economic investments to secure other needs.

In simple terms, Nana Akufo Addo’s policy of Free Senior High School Education is the best way to provide access to secondary education as it reliefs many of the required financial obligation which has become the biggest obstacle to access and not the space. In this regard, an educational policy that places priority on the future development needs of the people by curtailing imminent future challenges can only be described as strategic; and as far as that policy suits the progress of the people of Ghana, it cannot miss the description of being fine.

Nonetheless, the Free Senior High School Education as proposed by Nana Akufo Addo is not a one-way project but an all-inclusive one that includes putting teachers first and providing infrastructure. It was a policy that places the teacher in the driving seat of modern state-of-the-art infrastructure where the student’s safety becomes the ultimate concern.

It ensures that accessing secondary education is not the preserve of the rich but of every person who has Ghanaian blood running through his veins. This makes sure that access to education ceases to be based on the content of one’s pocket but on the flames of ones desire for enlightenment and empowerment. It makes sure that the state takes ultimate responsibility in equipping the citizens and not a situation where the state chooses its duties based on how cheap or expensive they appear.

However fine and strategic this policy is, it ought to be self-rewarding of hard work and quality performance. This makes it necessary to make amends to the effect that only qualified candidates are not financially impeded from accessing secondary education. Such an amendment to the policy will ensure competition for access based on qualification further enriching the quality of products from the Junior High Schools and naturally evolving a condition of 100% qualification and absorption of basic school candidates into the secondary schools.

Whatever the case may be, it is the hope of all well-meaning Ghanaians that politicians will cultivate such courage and nationalism to evolve policies that meet squarely the development needs of their country whether they secure for them the political glory or not. It is my believe somehow, somewhat, that this policy of Free Senior High School Education will not disappear from Ghana’s political development agenda lest we be condemned by the innocent souls of succeeding generations for whose interest we undertake to govern.

By David Azuliya

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