By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Jan. 13, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom is a hypocrite for crying out so deafeningly loudly. And here, of course, I am referring to his rather self-righteous tirade against Ghana's Fourth-Republican governments for not implementing the constitutional stipulation of Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education (FCUBE) - (See "FCUBE A Right, Not A Privilege - Nduom" Today Newspaper 1/13/15).
First of all, the Chapter 6 of the 1992 Constitution that the founding-proprietor of the Progressive People's Party (PPP) is invoking is glaringly contradictory. And this ought to tell the critical thinker and reader about the abject intellectual vacuity of those who cobbled our rag-tag Fourth-Republication Constitution together. For starters, you cannot have a constitution that mandates the implementation of a Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education and then within the same breath also mandate the implementation of free education "at all [academic] levels." Maybe this is the peculiar problem of having a Constituent Assembly composed almost entirely of non-native speakers and users of the English language draw up the country's 1992 Fourth-Republican Constitution.
"Free education at all levels" is not synonymous with "basic education." And, of course, different polities or nations define basic education differently. Under the Nkrumah-led government of the Convention People's Party (CPP), Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education meant the equivalent of a tenth-grade education. In some countries, as I believe has also been the case with the National Democratic Congress (NDC), basic education varies between eight and ten years of elementary education. Under the Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), of which Dr. Nduom was a prominent cabinet appointee, basic education meant at least twelve years of elementary and secondary education.
And so what needs to be foregrounded in the debate on free education is precisely how many years of schooling represents basic education. The Constitution also creates a problem vis-a-vis the implementation of an FCUBE policy, when it inserts the adjective of "feasible" into the same. Feasible, of course, means either manageable or affordable. In this instance, it is purely an economic problem; and Ghanaians have witnessed leaders of the so-called National Democratic Congress play expedient political games with the adjective in reference here. There was even a time, for instance, when Ms. Akua Sena Dansua, the current Ghana's Ambassador to Germany, then Minister for Women and Children's Affairs, if memory serves yours truly accurately, suggested a drastic reduction in the number of years that girls spent schooling in order to conveniently push them into early marriages!
Now, let's talk about which government in Ghana invented the corrupt and warped culture of 50-year-old men routinely consorting with 19-year-old women. One lecherous parliamentarian and former deputy cabinet appointee even had the temerity to propose that the nubile age for women ought to be reduced from 18 years to 16 years of age. And guess what, this 40-something-year-old man was found to have been consorting with a 16-year-old girl-child!
My problem with Dr. Nduom inheres in the fact that the former prime-mover of the rump-Convention People's Party (r-CPP) served in Ghana's parliament for about a dozen years. In other words, Dr. Nduom does not come to the FCUBE debate a total stranger. He was with the rascally hoodlum pack right from the beginning; and so, perhaps, it would be more meaningful for him to start talking about what bold measures he initiated in order to guarantee the comprehensive implementation of the FCUBE policy of which he seems to have become the foremost pontiff almost overnight. I am not talking about his, admittedly, yeomanly attempt to making his Elmina hometown a major hub of postcolonial education in the country.
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