Rural Education in Danger?

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo is one leader who has demonstrated time and again that education is very dear to his heart; so much so that he is willing to sacrifice his job, provided that is enough to elevate minimum education in Ghana to secondary school level.

And in less than two years in office, he has not only made secondary education free, but has also indicated that the policy could be extended to primary and university levels, provided the economy will be able to sustain that.

Free Senior High School, he always stressed, was just a means towards rapid national development.

But that vision of making education the super highway to development can only be realized if the right environments are created for both learning and teaching.

For now, news coming in from parts of the country do not suggest the nation is well grounded that takeoff.

We hear over 99 per cent of lower primary school children in the Ada West District in the Greater Accra Region do not know who the President of the Republic of Ghana is.

According to reports, during a tour of some five basic schools in the district recently, only one pupil answered the question satisfactorily.

The District Chief Executive, Hon. Adzoteye Lawer Akrofi, who embarked on the tour dubbed: My First Day At School, with the District Director of Education, Madam Winnifred Aku Gbadago, and some journalists reportedly had the rudest shock of his life at the development.

The report said at Anyamam, when the DCE randomly asked six primary two pupils of the Presbyterian Primary School who the current President of Ghana was, none of them gave the right answer. While three of them said John Mahama, each of the other three mentioned former President Agyekum Kuffour, the Greater Accra Regional New Patriotic Party (NPP) Chairman, Eric Agorhom and Eric Abayateye, the Assemblyman for Anyamam Electoral Area.

When the team visited four other basic schools in the district (at Lolonya, Kportitsekorpe, Wekumagbe and Akplabanya), the situation was not any different. At the end of the day, only one pupil mentioned President Nana Addo Darkwa Akufo Addo’s name as current president of Ghana.

Of course, this is not the first time such an abysmal scenario was recorded in the Fourth Republic. During the late John Evans Atta Mills’ era, pupils in Agona Nsabaa in the Agona West District of the Central Region also mentioned the then opposition leader, Nana Akufo Addo’s name as the then president of Ghana.

But that was in an election year, and one could say the captivating campaign advertisements on radio and television could have contributed to the ‘seeming confusion’ in the minds of the kids.

THE PUBLISHER considers the Ada West situation not only embarrassing to the NPP, but also lamentable.

The paper is of the view that the District Chief Executive, District Director of Education and the District Director of National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) all have tons of questions to answer. If these officers were to be working as expected, the children would have easily known who the President of Ghana was.

Finally, we call on the Ministry of Education, to jump off the ‘free education bandwagon’ and do something more tangible about teaching and learning in all the rural areas, as education is not only about its freeness.

This is our clarion call to government.