Mahama's 200 Community Day SHS project won’t fly – Baako

Editor -in-Chief of the New Crusading Guide, Kwaku Baako has said government’s 200 Community Day Senior High School project is bedeviled with massive financial constraints.

According to the veteran journalist, money voted for the project is woefully inadequate; a situation he said has created a huge deficit.

President John Dramani Mahama last Thursday launched government’s progressively free senior high school programme for second cycle students across the country, optimistic that the intervention would scale up the quality of the needed human capital for the accelerated development of the country.

Consequently, in fulfillment of its promise and in accordance with the directive of the 1992 Constitution of making secondary education progressively free, government released some GHc12.2 million to enable the Education Ministry pay for the first term of the 2015/2016 academic year.

President Mahama, who also commissioned the first of 200 Community Day Senior High School projects to tie-in with the start of the Progressively Free Senior High School programme at a colourful ceremony at Ekumfi Otuam in the Central Region, said both commitments were premised on the quest to improve the quality, expand access and equity in secondary education, and to reduce the cost of secondary education on parents in deprived communities.

Speaking on Peace FM, Kwaku Baako, claimed that contractors at the various sites are not happy with the lack of adequate funds, which he said is bound to adversely delay the completion of the project.

“I’m beginning to suspect that people in officialdom are not telling the truth about the project for fear that the citizens will see they have failed and will not vote for them come 2016 elections. I’m doing some work on this issue, sooner than later the evidence will come out,” Kwaku Baako noted.