Franklin Cudjoe’s Comments On The WASSCE Results Are Baseless And Ridiculous!

IMANI Ghana, over the years, has been one of the most revered institutions in Ghana and beyond. The think tank has conducted a lot of research into policies and programmes and proffered some measures aimed at helping resolve some of the challenges successive governments were faced with. However, the trajectory adopted by the outfit lately, thanks to its founding father, Franklin Cudjoe, is eroding the serene beauty that IMANI is known for.

Having had his vile propaganda against the Ministry of Communications and the National Communications Authority apropos the KelniGVG contract torpedoed, Franklin Cudjoe has found it necessary to redeem his battered image with any straw that his eyes come into contact with.

It is against this backdrop that the President of IMANI Ghana is in town, all guns blazing, attacking the results of the just released WASSCE candidates and preaching doom and prophesying that a very bleak future awaits students enjoying Free SHS who will sit for WASSCE.

In effect, omniscient and the repository of all knowledge, Franklin Cudjoe, is creating the impression that if these non-Free SHS students performed abysmally in their exams, it stands, therefore, to reason that those under the Free SHS programme will have a worse performance.

Banking his strange theory on the percentages in Mathematics and English Language in the 2017 results, Mr. Cudjoe does a projection into the future without embarking on a similar trip down memory lane to look at their figures.

Let us take a look at happenings in the past years as far as students' performances in these core subjects are concerned;

In 2013, 19.15% of candidates who sat for the exams passed in the core subjects.

In the year 2014, 28.11% passed in the core subjects including English Language and Mathematics.

In 2015, WAEC indicated that 25.29% passed in Mathematics, 23.63% passed in Integrated Science and 50.29% passed in English Language.

Social Studies improved from 52.25% in 2016 to 73.27% while Integrated Science jumped from 43.66% in 2016 to 50.52% in 2017. Franklin Cudjoe conveniently ignores these facts and looks at the ones that suit his tendentious motives.

While it would appear that English Language has not been doing well per these statistics, it is important to note that this trend has been living with us since time immemorial. It is, therefore, puzzling why Franklin Cudjoe would tend to blame the government of the day for these outcomes and cast a direly gloomful picture of the future in the yet-to-be-written WASSCE examinations.

The rather mercurial vicissitudes of these results clearly defeat Franklin Cudjoe’s strenuous efforts to bastardize the implemented Free Senior High School policy.

The challenges in our educational sector are multifaceted and cannot be blamed on one event. This setting of the stage on the part of Franklin Cudjoe for Ghanaians to lampoon the Free SHS policy when students sit for exams in future should be condemned by all well-meaning Ghanaians.

It would appear that Mr. Cudjoe’s failure to win the argument against the KelniGVG contract has propelled him to fixate his attention on a policy that is at the heart of Ghanaians as well as this administration.

Franklin Cudjoe is way off beam with his comments on the performance of students in the 2017 WASSCE results. His understanding of the Free SHS policy is shallow. He is trying all within his might to plunge his IMANI outfit into oblivion with such baseless assertions.