Is This NDC School Accredited?

I am, of course, talking about the establishment of the so-called Ghana Institute of Social Democracy (GISD), a patent illegality of dubious intent that ought to be promptly scrapped by both the Ghana Education Service (GES) and whichever institution is charged with academic accreditation in the country (See “NDC School Admits First 420 Students” MyNewsGh.com / Ghanaweb.com 9/11/17). For starters, a school that has been established with the primary and/or sole intent of facilitating the return to power of the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) or any political power, for that matter, cannot have the greater and wholesome interest of the country at large as its raison d’être, more so when that sole intent involves the exclusive certification of graduates to take up taxpayer-sponsored administrative and executive jobs.

At best, it is a terrorist organization aimed at hijacking Ghana’s robust and merit-based democratic political culture, of whose salutary creation the leadership of the main opposition National Democratic Congress cannot be remarkably credited, to hear Prof. William Ahadzie, the school’s director or rector tell it. Indeed, this is not the very first time that Ghanaians are being scammed by a Left-leaning political establishment. We all know about the infamous Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute (KNII), established by the erstwhile proto-Convention People’s Party (CPP) with the sole intent and purpose of converting the country’s political culture at the time into a socialistic command monolith. In the end, the KNII came to represent the institutional meal ticket for any Ghanaian, and foreigner as well, who desired a civil and public service employment.

Prof. Ahadzie says that the primary objective of the NDC-owned and operated Ghana Institute of Social Democracy is to ensure that the main opposition National Democratic Congress is returned to power, by hook or crook, come 2020. Does this mean that in the highly likely event of the NDC’s losing Election 2020, the GISD intends to disband? Now, this is a relevant and serious question to ask because the unmistakable implication here is that the Ghana Institute of Social Democracy would have clearly outlived its usefulness.

But we are here more concerned with the publicly stated fact that the GISD had opened with the original intent of enrolling some 100 pioneering students. Now what this statement of intent means is that the GISD, properly speaking, was only equipped to handle at most 100 students. So why are we now being told that the school has, somehow, been prepared for the present intake of slightly more than four times its originally targeted intake capacity? Something is definitely not right here, and Prof. Ahadzie had better promptly step up to the proverbial plate and publicly explain the same.

We also need to be told what curricular fare is being offered by the GISD that cannot be provided by any of the country’s publicly sponsored academies, such as the country’s flagship academy, the University of Ghana, the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and any of the other major tertiary academies and their institutional satellites around the country. And significantly also, we are not told about the specific qualifications that a prospective applicant needs to have in order to qualify for admission to GISD. And equally significantly, of course, precisely why any diploma or certificate awarded by the Ghana Institute of Social Democracy must be honored or accepted as being equivalent to those offered by the country’s mainstream or traditional academies.

We also need to know the operating budgetary capacity of the GISD and its source or sources of funding, since Prof. Ahadzie and the faculty of the GISD do not appear to be providing their administrative and pedagogical services gratis. It is also an unquestionable fact that absolutely no individual or group of Ghanaian citizens can simply establish the sort of partisan-oriented institution that the movers-and-shakers of the National Democratic Congress have apparently been allowed to illegally establish, with the sole purpose of effectively sabotaging Ghanaian democracy.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
September 16, 2017
E-mail: [email protected]