Free SHS: We were on the same side with NPP – Mahama

President John Dramani Mahama has revealed that it was the “pettiness of Ghana’s politics” that made it appear as if the National Democratic Congress (NDC) had a different stance from the New Patriotic Party (NPP) on the issue of free secondary education during the 2012 electioneering campaign.

“We're all on the same side,” President Mahama mentioned in an interview with The Africa Report on Monday, April 28.

“The basic vision for secondary education is in our constitution, which says that we shall make it available to all children and that we shall make it progressively free,” he noted.

The offer of free secondary education to Ghanaians was seen as the flagship campaign message of then leader of the opposition NPP, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, during the 2012 campaign period.

“It's just how it should be achieved that was the difference [between the parties],” President Mahama pointed out in his interview.

He said the NDC was more concerned with quality, access and affordability.

He said those indicators informed the party’s decision to build 200 community-based schools across the country by 2016.

Already, sod has been cut for the first of these model schools in Nyanoa in the Eastern Region.