Dr Tony Oteng Gyasi, a renowned Ghanaian businessman has commended government for making moves to remove the 25 per cent corporate tax on private tertiary educational institutions.

“I strongly urge government to follow through on this policy. Privately arranged education, at any level, is in the nature of what has become known as social enterprise. It is a private sector assumption of responsibility for the provision of a public typically undertaken by government.”

Dr Oteng-Gyasi gave this commendation during the third matriculation ceremony of the Family Health University College, Ghana’s premier Private Medical School in Accra.

The Matriculants, made up of 46 Graduate Medical students and 32 regular medical students are from Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroun, Benin, Canada, Britain and the United States of America.

Apart from the Medical College, the school also runs regular courses for Medical Assistants, Nursing and Midwifery and a standard hospital that works 24 hours.

Dr Oteng-Gyasi said although the removal of the taxes could be advantageous to the private sector, there was the need to encourage them in partnership than taxing them to collapse.

“Private tertiary institutions should not be a taxable opportunity in a nation that is unable to provide enough places for qualified applicants.”

He said although he recognized the fact that some operators of such schools could be overly making profits, the solution was not in the heavy taxes on schools.

He called on government to instead institute strong and feasible regulatory framework for quality management of private schools and ensure that minimum amount of re-investment for expansion and infrastructural improvement.

Dr Oteng-Gyasi appealed to the matriculants to take their courses seriously in order to complete to play meaningful roles in the health sector.

“Your acceptance into medical school puts you in the top 10 per cent of your peers academically. This may be cause for pride, but it is also cause for you to ask yourself the purpose of your life, why do you want to be a doctor and what do you want out in life?

Professor E.Y Kwawukume, President of the Family Health University College said his outfit believed in keeping abreast with modern methods of teaching and learning alongside the traditional methods.

“We make sure you are introduced to the hospital wards from the first year of your training and get to use real cadavers to study anatomy and also have the modern state of the art anatomage to enhance your learning capacity.”

He gave the assurance that the College would do everything under their purview to raise standards to become a novelty in not only in West Africa, but in the entire continent in the coming years.