The New Patriotic Party’s National Youth Organiser, Henry Nana Boakye has described the 2020 manifesto of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) as a “scam”.
According to him, some of the policies stated in the manifesto are neither sound nor feasible.
Speaking on the Majority Caucus on JoyNews, he stressed that the promises made in the NDC’s 2020 manifesto especially in the area of education were “a package of lies”, and for that Ghanaians should not give the NDC their votes in the upcoming elections.
He was emphatic about the uncertainty surrounding the NDC’s promise to phase out the double-track system.
According to him, the NDC has no substantive plan to do so, nor do they have a clear appreciation of the situation at hand.
He said: “Now when you ask them when are you going to phase [it out] or when are you going to scrap the double-track? ‘O we don’t know, we’re going to phase it out’. And I’m like, are you serious?
“Because the essence of [the] double track was to accommodate these students while we build these infrastructures so that [by] the time that we have more infrastructures then gradually we’ll be taking them off. That is the essence of it. So they don’t know anything, I’m surprised”.
He was even more troubled by the NDC’s plan to extend the Free Senior High School (SHS) policy to private second-cycle institutions in underdeveloped and deprived areas of the country.
According to him, there are no second-cycle institutions in deprived areas; all the private second cycles institutions are located in the urban areas and are expensive.
He said: “And what is even more dangerous is they were going to extend free SHS to private institutions in less developed, underdeveloped deprived areas. I don’t understand this. When you go to my village you don’t see any private institution there.
“In fact most private institutions are business-oriented. They’re giving your kid education and at the same time, they’re making their own money. It is business for them. Because you’re paying huge school fees most of them are located in the urban centres.”
The host of the show, Vincent Ekow Assafuah who is also the Public Relations Officer of the Education Ministry said it was evident that the NDC had not thought through their policy before including it in their 2020 manifesto.
He wondered how they planned to absorb the fees of students who were enrolled in international private schools.
“Even with that, if I’m a proprietor of a Junior High School which is supposed to be a private institution. Now I decide that I charge students who come to that particular school GHS 3000. Now government also decides that ‘I want to pay GHS 1500 flat rate for every student across the country’ Vincent said.
He argued that “if you pay GHS 1,500 to that particular child in that international school what it means is that their education is not free because the person is going to foot the remaining bill”.
That, for Mr Assafuah, is “what they failed to do as far as the thinking is concerned”.
He concluded that extending the Free SHS policy to private second-cycle institutions in underdeveloped and deprived areas would create inequality in the system instead of bridging the already existing divide.