Our attention has been drawn to a story with the headline “RLG laptops for schools on sale” credited to the Ghana News Agency (GNA) which has been widely circulated on various media platforms these past few days.

We wish to place on record that the story which itself is credited to findings from a supposed research carried out by the Ghana National Education Campaign Coalition (GNECC) has several factual untruths and misrepresentations.

The story among others stated that the research discovered a mismatch between syllabus, textbooks and software installed on the laptops. While this statement lacks clarity in itself, we state very clearly that RLG was not given any specific syllabus or course to design the laptops for. The laptops supplied by RLG as was required by the Ministry of Education are standard laptops with basic specifications designed to make it easier for teachers and students in the teaching and learning of ICT. RLG even went out of its way to purchase and install Windows 7 Operating System on all the computers to enhance its usage.

The research again, according to the story, stated rather erroneously that the computers/ laptops were procured by the Ministry of Education through sole sourcing procurement. This we will state is another obvious untruth in the said research and the story subsequently churned out from it. We place on record that the laptops were procured through restricted tendering which awarded the supply of the computers for schools to three companies – RLG, Omatek and Zepto.

We further state that, so far, RLG has met fully the requirements of the contract, delivering every single laptop as was contracted. One may ask, did the coalition bother to check whether the other companies had fulfilled their part of the contract and supplied even a single laptop?

On the issue of the laptops being sold, we state that RLG cannot verify the authenticity of the claims made by the said coalition. We proceed to emphatically put on record that RLG doesn’t sell computers meant for the Ministry of Education programme on the market.

As stated earlier, RLG has produced and delivered to the ministry all the laptops as was contracted. Therefore, if any of the laptops have found their way onto the market, RLG cannot be held responsible for it and the Company would definitely not take responsibility for any such happening, that is, if indeed it can be proven that laptops meant for the Ministry of Education are being sold on the market.

Again, the story claimed without giving any specifics that “most of the teachers and heads had little or no computer skills” and suggested that that made the programme unfeasible. Firstly, it should be self evident even to the coalition that it is not compulsory or a pre-requisite for Headmasters to be computer literate before an ICT programme can be run in any school.

Secondly, any serious checks by the Coalition would have established that the Ministry of Education is currently undertaking a training programme which targets to train 50,000 teachers in ICT by the close of the year and that indeed, a number of them have already been trained to undertake the teaching of ICT in various schools and complement the number of teachers who already are ICT literate.

For RLG, it is quite bizarre that a supposed Coalition on Education was able to supposedly carry out a research on such a pertinent issue without bordering to seek any inputs from the Ministry of Education or RLG or any of the companies involved. Any contact to these outfits would have easily corrected some of the obvious untruths and misrepresentations; and the failure of the coalition to do these basic checks and contact such outfits for their inputs suggest that possibly the said findings lack any coherent basis or were just put out to create mischief.