Ursula repeated a falsehood by Bawumia over 90% of SHS connected to wifi - Clement Apaak

The Member of Parliament for Builsa South Dr. Clement Abas Apaak has shot down claims by the Minister-designate of Communication and digitalization, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, that 90 percent of Senior High Schools in the country have been connected to free Wi-Fi.

These claims by the nominee the legislator stated are untrue and deceptive.

During her vetting on Monday, February 15, 2021, the Minister-designate announced that 90 percent of SHS schools have been connected to Wifi.

She told the committee that what was left was “how to replicate that in the junior high schools as the Education Ministry seeks to introduce blended learning (a mixture of virtual learning and face to face) and, so, we will need to put in place the infrastructure to support such. It is one of our priority areas.”

Speaking at the opening of the government’s free tertiary Wi-Fi project in Accra in November 2020, Vice-President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia noted that all 260 District Education Offices and 46 Colleges of Education in the country will also be beneficiaries of the government’s ‘free Wi-Fi for schools’ project.

The project is intended to broaden the scope of education, Information, Communication and Technology (ICT), research, and knowledge acquisition in schools.

But commenting on this, the legislator said the nominee lied just as Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia did last year and when he was challenged to provide the evidence, he went stone cold.

He is demanding the full list of the schools that have benefitted from the Wifi connection from the Minister-designate.

He wondered why the nominee would make claims she had no foreknowledge of before the committee.

“This is not true. I remember challenging Veep Bawumia when he made this wild claim last year to furnish us with the list of 80% of SHSs, which is 577 of 721 Senior High Schools that he claimed were connected to WiFi on Asempa FM on September 30th, 2020, he went stone cold!

“On record, we have 721 SHSs in Ghana, it’s not true that 649, being 90% of 721 SHSs have free Wi-Fi as Ursula told the vetting committee. When Ursula was pressed further she said she was told, and that the implementing Ministry was Education and the agency, GES. If she has no first-hand knowledge of this, why did she repeat a falsehood started by Bawumia?”