‘Election promise divides Ghana’

Free school or better school?

Deprivation

ACCRA, Dec 2, (AFP): If Andrews Ampedu’s security guard salary won’t cover the cost of high school for his children in this West African nation, he thinks there’s only one other place they can go in their teenage years.

“If I can’t afford it, I’ll send them to the village to farm,” Ampedu said.

Ampedu is the type of voter Ghana’s main opposition presidential candidate, Nana Akufo-Addo of the New Patriotic Party, is counting on in Dec 7 elections.

Akufo-Addo is offering parents a deal that seems difficult to refuse: abolishing fees at senior high schools which can amount to several hundred dollars per term and keep education out of reach for many families.

The ruling party and incumbent President John Dramani Mahama says the idea is great on paper, but not yet possible as the money shortage could greatly harm education in this nation of 25 million people.

He prefers to concentrate on improving education and eventually working toward the goal of completely free schooling.

The voters will have their say, but the fact that a true policy debate how to spend the country’s new oil money. This election, for president as well as for the 275-seat parliament, has its problems. Supporters of the ruling party in one town have been attacked and needed hospitalization; there have been credible reports of a member of the ruling party hiring thugs to disrupt balloting. Isolated though these incidents might be, they remind Ghanaians that democracy is fragile. “I don’t take it for granted,” said Martina Odonkor, an author. She was 13 in the 1979 coup and can talk about the fear people felt of disappearing into Burma Camp, the military headquarters in Accra, the capital.

“We heard women were being beaten up in the streets by soldiers because they were wearing trousers, and all kinds of crazy stuff like that. It was an atmosphere of fear, tension and increasing deprivation,” she said. “The universities shut down, boarding schools shut down. Education basically stopped. “There were fuel has occurred seems to be another sign of Ghana’s maturing democracy.

The country has already gained a reputation in recent years as a relatively stable democracy in West Africa, where a number of countries continue to struggle with instability.

Its economy is the second largest in the region thanks to exports of gold and cocoa. The government is counting on oil production, which began in 2010, to grow the economy further.

But there is much to be done to improve education, with some teachers in rural areas holding classes under trees and those in cities sometimes badly underequipped.

Free schooling is a tantalising offer in Ghana, where the World Bank estimates the average Ghanaian makes about $1,400 a year and the government says only about 14 percent of people finish high school.

Ghana’s constitution guarantees free education, but only on paper. In reality, high school students often have to hand over cash for a list of supplies and services, ranging from the library to uniforms.

There is worry that free high shortages, food shortages and people were accused of hoarding if they had crates of goods in their houses.”

Until recently democracy was on the upswing in Africa. According to Freedom House, the Washington, DC-based think tank, on a scale of “free,” ‘’partly free” and “not free,” the number of “free” nations grew from 3 to 11 between 1989 and 2007, while the “not free” fell from 34 to 13.

But Freedom House’s Africa programs director, Vukasin Petrovic, warns of “a steady decline in democracy” in recent years.

“The sharpest declines occurred in the categories of Freedom of Expression and Belief (22 countries), Political Pluralism and Participation (20 countries), and Rule of Law (20 countries),” he wrote in February.

“The deterioration in these areas reflects the determination of political elites to hold on to power at any cost, and particularly to hijack elections,” he wrote, and warned that unless things changed, “sub-Saharan Africa will continue to slip back toward where it started in the early 1970s.” school could drain government coffers.

“It is possible that it could be done, but of course that would mean that you would have to forgo other priorities,” said Franklin Cudjoe, founding director of thinktank IMANI Centre for Policy and Education.

“We haven’t heard about what would be cut back.”

In a speech in August, AkufoAddo estimated that it would cost about $400 million to implement free high school next year, and eventually go up to $768.6 million after three years.

Mahama has rejected that as too expensive. His National Democratic Congress party would rather focus for now on expanding secondary education and building public universities.

Though its education system is better than many of its neighbours, a recent UNESCO report said half of women and a third of men in Ghana who had completed six years of schooling could not read.

The opposition NPP has said it would pay for the expanded education with revenue from Ghana’s oil sector, which currently produces about 86,000 barrels per day but has plans to expand.

Even in Ghana, after five peaceful, multicandidate elections in a row,suspicion of fraud still runs high, and there are widespread fears that the biometric voter ID won’t work.

Still, those like Odonkor who remember the bad times are especially apt to value what they have gained.

Shipped to school abroad, she returned in 1992 to a country holding its first democratic election. And now, “there is freedom of speech and freedom of the press, a huge difference from that time.” And Ghanaians make full use of that freedom to air a litany of complaints against their elected leaders. Although Ghana registered the fastest economic growth in subSaharan Africa in 2011, spurred by new oil production and a construction boom, Ghanaians ask why they aren’t feeling richer. Kwesi Jonah, a research fellow with the Accra-based Institute for Democratic Governance, says Ghana’s democracy is a “democracy without jobs, democracy without good drinking water, democracy without roads, without a good supply of electricity.”