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01.02.2019 Feature Article

Does Mahama Speak English?

Does Mahama Speak English?
01.02.2019 LISTEN

I am fast beginning to realize that rather than roundly and harshly condemn the former Atta-Mills’ Presidential Spare-Tire, Mr. John Dramani Mahama actually deserves our sympathy and immediate psychiatric examination. It may be recalled that canvassing for delegates’ support in the leadup to the 2020 Presidential-Election Primary of the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), recently, in the Eastern Regional Capital of Koforidua, the former President was reported to have said that it was the NDC that pioneered the Akufo-Addo-implemented fee-free Senior High School System, with the establishment of Community Day School, and that what he and his party supporters and associates were against was the Double-Track System that had enabled each and every able-bodied Ghanaian youth to fully access the SHS system (See “We Will Not Abolish Free SHS – Mahama” Modernghana.com 1/20/19).

This is a flat-out lie. Indeed, any Ghanaian adult citizen who is about the same age as Mr. Mahama cannot recall any moment in our country’s history when there were no Day Secondary Schools or Half-Day and Half-Boarding Secondary Schools in the country. I also don’t recall any Ghanaian high school student attending the same for free, other than the Nkrumah-instituted fee-free SHS system for northern-descended Ghanaian citizens, during the 8-year tenure of the Mills-Mahama regime. “I know the benefits of education to the fortunes of development, and so NDC would provide the necessary infrastructure to accommodate all students at once,” Mr. Mahama was quoted to have said in Koforidua.

So the question that he ought to be logically asked is why didn’t he, during the 8 years that he served at the Presidency, “provide the required infrastructure to accommodate all the students” whose quality of education, he claims, is being callously depreciated by the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP)? It may interest the Dear Reader to learn that even as I write, an unacceptably high percentage of primary and middle-school pupils lack the basic infrastructural facilities to enable them to comfortably learn and be able to favorably compete against their counterparts in both the Third World and the advanced democracies.

I also don’t know why the former Rawlings’ Communications Minister thinks that it makes good sense for the opportunity to access fee-free universal education for the children of the very poor and destitute must be delayed or sacrificed, until the requisite infrastructural facilities are put in place, which, in effect means summarily denied or totally destroyed altogether, while his “Cash-and-Carry” do-nothing government gradually musters the requisite resources to provide access to all, by which time these equally talented youths would have irreparably lost every opportunity to improve themselves and the future of our country.

As for his argument that pursuing the Double-Track System would negatively impact the quality of public education in the country, it may interest the Dear Reader to learn that just about 7 years ago, a global survey conducted by the UN-sponsored Paris-based OECD – the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development – of some 145 countries around the globe found the quality of Ghana’s education to be 145th/145th. In other words, Ghana had the poorest quality of education in the world. And this dismal global ranking occurred smack under the watch of the NDC-sponsored Mills-Mahama regime.

What this means, of course, is that the quality of our country’s education could absolutely get no worse than it had been callously and unconscionably plunged down the doldrums by Messrs. John Evans Atta-Mills, late, John Dramani Mahama and their partners, associates and executive minions. We need to also significantly recall for the benefit of our readers that it was during the period that the Mills-Mahama regime was busy toying with the argument over whether it made a whit of any remarkable difference, if the standard 4-year Senior High School System that obtains in nearly every one of the most civilized and technologically advanced democracies could be reduced to just three years and made equally effective.

I also remember fiercely battling the then Mills-appointed Minister for Women, Children and Gender Protection, Ms. Akua Sena Dansua, who pontifically claimed, with the staunch backing of Messrs. Mills and Mahama, that the overriding objective of a high school education, for young women, was to quickly graduate and grab a husband on the highly flourishing Ghanaian marriage market. In sum, for the likes of Mr. Mahama, the unconscionable manufacture or production of a critical mass of an illiterate youthful population in the country was much better than facilitating ready access to even a poor or middling quality of education for our youths; where, as already extensively discussed above, an elitist education policy is in no way correlative with a qualitative education.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
January 20, 2019
E-mail: [email protected]

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