Former Upper East Regional Minister, Tangoba Abayage had admitted that while the Free Senior High School programmes under the current government may have its own peculiar challenges, the programme has enhanced education, particularly at the 2nd cycle level.
The situation, according to Madam Abayage is miles ahead of the situation that existed under the erstwhile John Mahama regime.
She said this when she spoke to Gerard Asagi on the Day Break Upper East Show, Friday, October 7, 2022.
“For those of us in the north, students were sent home every now and then because they could not supply food. We have forgotten so soon. I believe that we may not be doing so well now but I believe strongly that if it was the other regime, it would be worse than it is now.”
“We used to tell children to come home. I was a teacher and we used to send out students home.”
“Even with all the soft landings that they had, we had serious challenges with the economy. I am imagining what would have happened with all of this crisis that we are facing,” she said.
Touching on complaints about the quality of the food at the various senior high schools, Madam Tangoba said, “when I was in secondary school, I went to secondary in in 1976 and our food was nothing better. We could read tz and capok leaves for a whole week. Every evening, we will eat the same food because government couldn’t supply much.”
Touching on the current financial crises, Madam Tangoba explained that Ghana’s case was not isolated. She however admitted that there may have been some lapses with management of the economy.
“Whether we like or not, every other economy is suffering. We may not be doing well and I am not saying this to get our heads swollen but we are better than so many other countries just the same way other countries are doing better than us. If I go back, where we didn’t have any of this challenges yet the system was tougher than this. We had 5 years without any econmic challenge anywhere on this earth [and yet] we had 5 years of no electricity.”
“We are not doing well but it isn’t that we decided that we would not manage the economy well. As a developing country, our systems are not strong enough to prevent us from mismanagement, unfortunately. We have serious systemic challenges and it’s just not the politicians. The civil servants like us, our lackadaisical attitude to work. Our petty corruption, our pilfering it is all over.”
Madam Tangoba agreed that there has to be increased supervision to ensure that the systems work better than they do now.
Source: A1radioonline.com|101.1MHz|Mark Kwasi Ahumah Smith|Ghana
