Dr. Clement Abas Apaak, a member of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) Manifesto Committee on Education, has defended the party’s proposal to scrap academic fees for first-year students of all public tertiary institutions.
According to him, the policy will currently cost the State less than GHC300million per available data.
He says the Africa Education Watch’s statistics for enrollment into the various tertiary institutions for the 2023/2024 academic year with the average fees being paid by each first year student makes the policy feasible for the government.
During the NDC Youth Manifesto launch in Accra Monday, August 12, 2024, the party’s flag bearer, John Dramani Mahama, promised to introduce the policy to support struggling students.
Speaking on News Central on TV3 Tuesday, August 13, 2024, the Builsa South lawmaker analysed the feasibility of the policy with facts available to the NDC’s outfit.
“We have looked at the figures and if we were to look at current figure put out by Africa Education Watch in the wake of this announcement, the data would suggest that for the 2023/2024 academic year, cumulatively, we are talking about public tertiary institutions so we are talking about Teacher training, technical universities, public universities, the number of students who enrolled, Africa Education Watch put the number at 125,000.
“If you look at the average academic fee that first year students are expected to pay, it’s in the range of GHC2000 to GHC2,400, so if you were to put the figures based on that benchmark, we’ll need less than GHC300m annually to finance this programme,” he indicated.
Dr. Apaak explained that the NDC is going to finance the policy by cutting on the budget for the Office of the President which has ballooned over the past few years.
“In the past few years under this Akufo-Addo-Bawumia government, the budgetary allocation to the office of government machinery, otherwise the presidency, has ballooned to billions of Ghana cedis. Last year it is 2billion, last year it was about GHC3billion, the year before, it was about 2billion as well. So we believe that within that context alone, we should be able to save sufficient resources to finance the police,” he disclosed.
He added that the next NDC administration will also block many corruption avenues to save money to support the initiative.
“We have also talked about the rigorous programme to fight corruption and to clear revenue loopholes,” he added.
Source:onuaonline.com