Agric students besiege MoFA to claim allowances

Students from five agricultural colleges in the country, on Wednesday stormed the premises of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture in Accra, to demand the immediate release of their allowances.

The demonstration by the Agric trainees comes a day after government launched the restoration of the nursing trainee allowances in Sunyani.

Government earlier announced restoration of nursing and teacher trainee allowances which had been cancelled by the Mahama administration in 2014.

The students from the Agricultural colleges expressed their dissatisfaction over what they describe an exclusion from the list of beneficiaries of allowances.

According to the students, the Akufo-Addo administration has reneged on promises they made to them during campaign in 2016 to restore their scrapped allowances, adding that several petitions to the Ministry of Food and Agriculture to have the issue resolved have proven futile.

“The Ministry has kept quiet for a long time. Government has released the allowances of teacher and nursing trainees, but we have been neglected. Our population is less than 3,000, but that of the teachers and nurses are over 58,000, yet government has refused to release our allowances. This is the second time we have been here,” one of the students lamented.

President of Agricultural Students Union of Kwadaso Agricultural training college, Philip Opoku-Mensah said government is being discriminatory in reinstating the allowances hence their protest.

“If they have restored that of these two institutions nothing stops them from restoring ours as well. We are going to be at the premises of the Agric Ministry until we also receive our share,” he stressed.

The protesting Agric trainees were from the following colleges: are Kwadaso College of Agriculture in the Ashanti Region, Damango Agricultural College in the Northern Region, Ohawu Agricultural College in the Volta Region, Ejura Agricultural College in the Ashanti Region and Animal Health and Production College also in the Northern Region

Nursing and teacher trainee allowances, as well as students in the various Agric colleges were scrapped by the past Mahama administration with a reason to increase student enrolment in the various training colleges, but the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in its manifesto, promised to restore the allowances.