A Senior Law lecturer at the University of Ghana Law School, Dr. Raymond Atuguba has warned that the government’s Free SHS policy is likely to collapse, if a legislation that makes it binding on all subsequent regimes is not passed.
Speaking at a Constitution Review Conference at Dodowa Friday, November 24, 2017, on Retooling the Constitution from political to a developmental one, Dr. Atuguba advocated legislative Instruments through Constitution Review to wean the programme off political interference.
“Let’s say that if NDC [National Democratic Congress] wins 2020 or 2024, you know they can cancel free SHS, you know that? What sense will that make? But right now without a binding national development plan, they can do that. With a binding national development plan, once you put in the plan that every government must work progressively towards free SHS, then no government can [scrap the policy].”
“…and we even added that before a government do that, a citizen can go to the supreme court and stop them,” the Executive Secretary of the Constitutional Review Committee added.
Second-cycle students are benefiting from the NPP government’s Flagship programme that excludes them from paying fees including admission, examination and utility fees.
But the laudable policy has its attendant challenges in the form of overcrowding, inadequate infrastructure among others which have characterized the programme.
Government has indicated it has begun in earnest addressing the key challenges that has bedeviled the implementation of the Free SHS policy.
But the Minority in Parliament insists the challenges bedeviling SHS education under Akufo-Addo’s flagship Free SHS policy are overwhelming and will cripple the schools soon.
