Managing Editor of the Ghanaian Observer, Egbert Faibille Jr, has described as “wickedness” on the part of the government, the delay in disbursement of feeding grants for Senior High Schools in the three regions up north.

All Eighty-three SHSs in the Northern, Upper East and Upper West regions delayed their re-opening on Monday January 13, 2014 due to a delay by the government to release their grants.

They included 44 SHSs in the Northern Region, 23 in the Upper East Region and 16 in the Upper West Region.

The Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, according to the Saturday edition of state-owned Daily Graphic, released GH¢50.4 million for the payment of the grants to the affected schools, including schools in the northern parts of the Brong Ahafo and Volta regions.

The money will cover the payment of arrears of feeding grants for the third term of the 2012-2013 academic year and the first term of the 2013-2014 academic year.

Mr Faibille Jr., however, wondered why schools in the impoverished northern part of the country should perennially suffer such difficulties while state funds were allegedly diverted into paying private firms under the Ghana Youth Employment and Entrepreneurial Development Agency (GYEEDA) programme.

He said the situation makes nonsense of the existence of the Savannah Accelerated Development Agency (SADA) programme which is meant to reduce poverty in the northern part of the country.

“Is there not a correlation between education and poverty; [such] that if you don’t education people they get poor? And so at a very cosmetic level you create SADA but fundamentally, the liberating weapon which is education, you are depriving [the students of] by saying there’s no money and you’re expecting the students of senior high schools in the northern part of Ghana to write the same exams with students in the southern part of Ghana and then when you finish, you go and create SADA. I mean I think that this is wicked. It is not commonsensical,” he fumed on Joy FM’s newsfile programme on Saturday.

According to him, the GYEEDA programme was used to rob and deprive the state of resources.

He said those indicted in the GYEEDA rot should be “fired, prosecuted and made to refund with interest”, monies stolen from the state through the implementation of the programme.