General News of Friday, 4 December 2020

Source: mynewsgh.com

Mahama started free SHS with no branding – Spio-Garbrah

Former Minister for Trade and Industry, Dr. Ekwow Spio-Garbrah Former Minister for Trade and Industry, Dr. Ekwow Spio-Garbrah

Former Minister for Trade and Industry, Dr. Ekwow Spio-Garbrah, has posited that the much-talked-about Free Senior High School education policy was started by the previous administration.

“It is always a good idea to make education as good as possible and progressively. As a Deputy Education minister then, I saw the implementation of the FCUBE programme which was available to all children. Mahama started a free education programme. The only thing is that it was not branded as such during his time,” Mr Spio-Garbrah further indicated.

According to the former Education Minister, the NDC was never against Free SHS as suggested by members of the governing NPP but only argued it was going to be difficult to implement the policy.

“We didn’t tag-free SHS as something that is not desirable. We only said it was going to be difficult to implement.”, the former Education Minister spoke on Citi TV’s Face -to- Face

“The NPP had a good policy but with a difficult implementation”, he told host, Umaru Sanda Amadu in an interview monitored by MyNewsGh.com

“Most parents thought they will implement it [free education] all at once in the first year. But they could not do all of them. They did one year at a time. So that was not a reflection of what they said. They even had to roll out the double-track system. Just to implement the policy”.

“There is nothing wrong with that. But they could have been a little bit frank with us that this is how they will roll it out,” he added.