NDC Rented Lecturers And Their Voodoo Maths on Free SHS

It is so sad when some Educationalist who are are expected to delve into the issue of the proposed free Secondary school as proposed by the NPP Presidential candidate allow their expert opinion to be massaged by their own political affiliation and allowed their stomach to think for them instead of their brains. I am not going to talk about all the financial numbers they churned out because the cost they reached is based on a voodoo maths numbers and therefore the numbers they came up with are wrong from the number of students who will attend secondary school to the money figures. Their analysis is flawed from the word go.

A group calling itself GHANA FIRST and supposed to be an Academic Think Tank composed of University Lecturers came out and condemned the free secondary school education as not feasible because of some voodoo maths it based its analysis on to reach that conclusion. According to the group, if the free education policy is implemented, there will not be enough infrastructure in existence to accomodate the influx of new students and they based this on some assumptions which even Pupil Teachers would have realised is not reliable and faulty. According to the leader of this group, one Dr. Ebenezer Kofi Hayford, lecturer, Department of Earth Science University of Ghana, The money and facilities needed to accomplish this policy for smooth transition is not available and he used the recent BECE candidates to try to prove his point but made one big mistake and made this analysis flawed.

"Dr. Hayford said the number of pupils from JHS ready to enter the SHS is more than the existing facilities can accommodate. This year alone, 376,859 candidates sat for the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) to fill 175,000 vacancies in the existing SHS schools nationwide. The vacancy available leaves a surplus of 201,000 pupils who will not be able to gain admission into the SHS. These 201,000 are unable to enter the SHS not because of cost but because of infrastructure deficit which includes laboratory space, dining halls space, Information Communication Technology space."

First, this assumption of 201,000 people not going to have a place to attend school is flawed. The NDC rented lecturers assumed that, we are going to have 100% passing rate for the BECE candidates and everybody who will take this examination will pass to qualify to go to secondary school and this voodoo maths tells me that, this group might not have a Matnematics or Statician Professor in their midst. The last three years starting from 2009 to 2011 shows that, on average, only 47% of all BECE candidates who take the examination qualifies to enter secondary school so why then are these Lecturers using 100% passing rate that has never been achieved in Ghana since independence? They are rented Lecturers and are intentionally massaging the figures to fit into what they were hired to achieve, and that is to lie to Ghanaians by their NDC hired Masters. The point is that, the advent of free secondary school education will not change the number of people who will be going to secondary school in 2014 from those who went in 2011 except a miniscue change in population that might increase the number not more than 5000 to 10,000 per year instead of the 201,000 as our 'Eminent' lecturers are talking about.

Secondly , this statemen is not true.t "These 201,000 are unable to enter the SHS not because of cost but because of infrastructure" Where did these lecturers get that information from? The true fact is that almost all the 201,000 did not pass the BECE to qualify for secondary school if you use the 47% passing rate average for the last three years. It is also not true that even if some of these people passed the BECE, they did not attend secondary school because of lack of infrastructure and not cost. Are these Lecturers telling us that all parents in Ghana can afford secondary school if we have the infrastructure to admit them? These Lecturers are telling Ghanaians that, every parent in Ghana can afford secondary school for their wards which is not true. Another point, did these Lecturers factor in the Northerners who are already receiving free secondary education before they reached their 1.3 billion cost annually?

Let me show you how their analysis is hollow and not based on any empirical analysis. They are assuming that all Junior high school graduates will go to secondary school which is stupidity. Even in a developed country like USA where I live and secondary school education is free, about 15% of the Junior high students do not go to secondary or High school as it is called here. The fact that SHS is going to be free does not mean those who fail BECE will go to secondary school and with a system that only about 47% of all BECE candidates pass for entry into secondary schools, the figures used by these bogus rented Lecturers makes their analysis academically dishonest.

President Mahama as a Northerner who enjoyed free SHS is the wrong messenger to oppose free education. Is it right for somebody like MAHAMA whose father was even a rich man in 1965 with 6 private cars according to President MAHAMA in his book, MY FIRST COUP D'ETAT to enjoy free education whilst the child of a farmer, fisherman or a child of a carpenter is denied the opportunity of a high school because they were not born in the North? You will think the Northerners will be the ones supporting this policy in their numbers but they are allowing their political interest to cloud their better judgement.

Mahama's father was a rich man and because of free education for his children, had 19 of them who went to school for free. How many of Mahama's own children have gone to high school for free? Some of these Northerners marry multiple women and have many children which is a status symbol in their culture without thinking about how they are going to support these children because their children go to school for free paid for by hard working cocoa farmers and taxes from poorly paid civil servants and these people have the audacity to tell the rest of us we cannot enjoy the same facility they have been enjoying for 55 years? Either free education for all or no free education for anybody, PERIOD. As a nation, we need educated class to develop our country and high school education should be made part of the basic education requirement in our country and made free.

At a time when the developed countries are about to reach a stage where a first degree from a University is the required minimum education to enter the corporate world, we should be at least one step behind them and make high school education free. When Dr Kwame Nkrumah made secondary school free for the Northerners, in 1957, there were not more than three secondary schools in the whole o two f Northern regions then and nobody argued that we didn't have infrastructure for that policy to take of. We can do this if we really want to develop our country and we cannot develop our country with uneducated citizens.

Justice Sarpong

Houston, Texas

(CARDINAL of TRUTH)