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Let The Rich Pay For Education

Feature Article Let The Rich Pay For Education
NOV 18, 2018 LISTEN

The Webster dictionary defines Policy as “a definite course or method of action selected from among alternatives and in light of given conditions to guide and determine present and future decisions”. The definition posits that, any formulated policy must have arrived from a carefully planned and well thought-through among the numerous alternatives that exists. Moreover, embedded in every good policy is its mass benefit especially to the poor and vulnerable in society.

Of all the policies that governments role out in order to drive her developmental agenda are education and health policies. Indeed, over the last fifty years, the nations that have catapulted their transformation agenda such as Malaysia, Korea, Singapore etc. has done so by getting their education and health policies right. Time and space will not permit me to talk about them here.

Back home in Ghana, the government has rolled out the “Free SHS Education” policy and the implementation is such that every SHS student is supposed to enjoy free education. The policy does not take into consideration the pay-ability of the parents neither does it consider the judicious application of the taxes she collects.

The point must be forcefully made that, the current implementation strategy of the ‘free’ education program defeats the efforts put in place to gradually gravitate towards progressive taxation that takes a portion of the excess money of the rich to support the weak and vulnerable in the society. Progressive taxation is moral and balances the social structure of the economy in order to avoid tilting into chaotic state.

In the current state of implementation of the education policy in Ghana, the peasant farmer, the ‘kayayoo’, the truck pusher and the likes, are basically being tax to educate the child of the Minister of State, the Parliamentarian, The Director of ‘so-so-and-so’ who are earning sometimes in excess of ¢100,000 monthly by way of salary and superfluous allowances. This phenomenon is rather the reversed scenario in all normal and progressive economies of the world.

It is very obvious and common knowledge that the health, safety and conducive learning environment of our children is dangerously at stake. If Mr. government continue to traverse this course, the fibre of our educational system will be destroyed, quality and standard of education will continue to fall and Ghana will lose her reputation as the education hub of West Africa, if not the whole African continent.

I am thus calling on government to allow those who have the ability and are willing to pay for their wards school fees to do so in order to apply the taxes of Ghanaians judiciously and selectively for the children of the poor and vulnerable in the society. If government don’t backtrack and heed to sound advice, the education sector will need not less than 18 billion cedis, twice the current budget allocated to the sector, to effectively run education in Ghana.

Bishop Nathaniel Rudolph

Director & Dean
College of Bishops & Deans

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