Addae-Mensah’s Elitist And Conservative Stance On Fee-Free SHS Is No Constructive Solution

A few things need to be made crystal clear, in view of Prof. Ivan Addae-Mensah’s very public criticism that the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) has not paid adequate heed to some technocrats who have virulently called the fee-free Senior High School policy initiative into serious question (See “National Interest Must Override Implementation of Political Promises – Addae-Mensah” MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 7/30/18). We need to quickly point out here that the Akufo-Addo government is not wholly made up of “career politicians,” as the former Vice-Chancellor of the country’s flagship academy, the University of Ghana, would have Ghanaians believe.

To be certain, the Akufo-Addo Administration may be saturated with an unprecedented number and percentage of the highest caliber of technocrats that may be found anywhere in civilized democracies of the same size around the world. So, really, Prof. Addae-Mensah unfairly insults the intelligence of the key operatives of the current government when he rather presumptuously suggests that the leaders of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) woefully lack good listening skills. What is, however, true and which Prof. Addae-Mensah may not want to hear is that it is his sort of clinically crippling conservatism that finds Ghana’s public education system on the bottom-most rung among the global comity of nations.

I have highlighted this fact several times already, but may need to reiterate the same here, again, for the especial attention of the internationally renowned and distinguished educator-scientist. And it is the fact that even as the immortalized Prof. Albert Einstein once said: “Ghanaians cannot repeat the same thing over and over again and expect to come up with different and more progressive results every time.” What the German-born Nobel Physics Prize Laureate politely omitted from his uncontestable observation is as follows: “This is what intellectual and professional stupidity is decidedly about.” And to expect the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party to doggedly pursue the same primitive and morally and culturally and scientifically and technologically regressive policies as the previous National Democratic Congress (NDC) regimes constitutes the height of stupidity. The fact of the matter is that Ghanaians are sick and tired and thoroughly fed up with the interminable slide down the proverbial primrose path of socioeconomic and cultural stagnation.

I am also quite certain that Prof. Addae-Mensah is fully aware of the very scandalous fact that according to the unimpeachably expert assessment by the Paris-based Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), by the time that the Mills-Mahama government left the former Flagstaff House, presently renamed Jubilee House, in January 2017, Ghana ranked an apocalyptic 146 out of 146 countries surveyed by the education mavens and technocrats of the globally respected OECD. What the preceding means is that even if President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and his bevy of crackerjack technocrats tried as hard as they “Sisypheanly” could, they would not be able to worsen the quality of the country’s basic and secondary public education any more than the Mahama Abongo Boys and Girls bequeathed the nation.

I should love to read or hear what Prof. Addae-Mensah had to say, when the Atta-Mills-led government of the National Democratic Congress drastically reduced the curricular and temporal span of the traditional 4-year SHS system to 3 years, with the categorically stated “mission” of facilitating the rapid turnover or graduation of female students in order for the latter to grab themselves well-heeled husbands and begin making babies and families in a timely fashion, as the then Gender Minister, Ms. AkuaSenaDansua, told the nation and the world at large. Have the pontifical and grotesquely grandstanding likes of Prof. Addae-Mensah figured out the fact that it was such criminal and fraudulent dismantlement, actually dastardly and systematically orchestrated stagnation of the quality of the nation’s public education, that put the kind of physical plant – or school building – pressure and deficit that presently confronts the nation, and which the Akufo-Addo Government has been working strenuously, imaginatively and constructively around the clock to offset and/or rectify in the offing?

The fact of the matter is that mischievously and unconscionably pretending that it is the fault of those who have been criminally shortchanged by the Mills-Mahama Posse, by being summarily denied the prime and inviolable opportunity to better themselves and their future could not be more genocidal. We are told that the earliest possible time by which this NDC-fangled SNAFU could be successfully and satisfactorily rectified is 7 years from hence. That was, of course, about as long as it took the NDC apparatchiks to totally mangle and destroy our basic education system, having been restored to its old and former credibility, good reputation and respectability by the John Agyekum-Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party. Maybe Prof. Addae-Mensah does not want to see the next generation of Ghanaian leaders and technocrats succeed and do much better than the present generation. I sincerely doubt that.

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