The Director & Lead Facilitator of Africa Entrepreneurship School, Dr. Paul Appiah-Konadu, has described a manifesto promise by the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) to pay academic fees for all first-year students entering public universities, teacher and nursing training colleges across the country for the 2024/2025 academic year as a misplaced priority.
The National Democratic Congress launched what they described as a ‘youth manifesto’ detailing what they intend to do for youth when voted into office. Portions of the manifesto read:
“Ensuring sustainable funding source for the Free Senior High School (SHS) education; Completing the construction of E-blocks and expanding infrastructure to guarantee access to all students. Commence the establishment of regional TVET Centres of Excellence integrated with fabrication laboratories equipped with 3D printers and other state-of-the-art facilities to promote innovation and simulate real work environments. Extend FREE SHS to cover students in private senior high schools. Implement a No-Fees-Stress Programme to alleviate the financial burden on parents and students in financing tertiary education. Specifically, we will implement a ‘NO Academic Fees’ policy at the University for 100 LEVEL students. Re-deploy the Student Loan Trust Fund Plus (SLTF Plus) to give continuing students the option to utilize student loans to directly finance their University Fees to guarantee the peace of mind of the student to study.”
According to Dr. Appiah-Konadu, there are several graduates roaming without jobs years after their graduation. He argues it would be more rational to invest in areas like agriculture, which can create more jobs for the numerous unemployed graduates.
Speaking on Daybreak Upper East, Dr. Appiah-Konadu admonished political parties to prioritize stabilizing the economy.
“As for the academic user fee for first-year university students, I was a bit surprised. I didn’t expect that from the NDC, especially when they have criticized the implementation of the Free SHS for not targeting the poor and students coming from deprived houses, and now they are proposing to do the same.”
“Already we are committing a little over 3 billion Ghana cedis to financing Free SHS, producing people who go to the university and become unemployed graduates. So I expected something different within the framework of our economy, maybe policies to build more manufacturing companies or support the private sector, to increase the manufacturing output of the economy or even support the agricultural sector with agric-mechanization and to encourage as many students as possible to go into agriculture, so we are able to increase agricultural production, agric-processing, and increase the participation of the youth in the agric-value chain in general.”
“I think those are the areas that will transform the structure of the economy. That will make us food-independent. That will help create sustainable employment. But if we are going around just giving freebies to university students, we already have a number of university students in the system or university graduates in the system who do not have jobs. And from the Ghana Statistical Service Survey about two years ago, out of the over 200,000 graduates that are coming out of our universities, public and private, just about 10% are getting jobs. So why go around supporting something that already is in excess supply?”
Source: A1Radioonline.com|101.1Mhz|Samuel Adagom|Bolgatanga
