Is President Mills heading for doom?

By: Samuel K. Obour

Forty-five years after his overthrow, kwame Nkrumah’s name continues to resonate
within and without the country.

In December 1999, listeners of the BBC voted Nkrumah ‘Africa’s Man of the
Millenium’. This was not because he was a magician, but because his legacy
continues to benefit millions of Africans home and abroad.

The current president of the Republic of Ghana, Prof. J.E.A. Mills, has begun
his third year as President, and it will be interesting to know the sort of
legacy he’d leave behind when he eventually leaves office.

Though some achivements have been made during the over two years he has been in
office, President Mills is doomed to a vague and uncertain legacy if he doesn’t
do more to address the basic concerns of majority of Ghanaians.

An enduring legacy

The good news for the President is that he still has time to build a lasting
legacy for himself. An imperishable legacy. Today, the name and works of Nkrumah
survive, despite attempts by the National Liberation Council (NLC) to dishonour
his legacy in the aftermath of the 1966 coup.

Nkrumah’s inspiring effect on the black man, his singular contributions to the
liberation of Ghana and the African continent and his unsurpassed achievements
as President of Ghana continue to impact the life of many an African today.
Ghanaians, especially, continue to benefit immensely from Nkrumah’s aggressive
development of infrastructure and his improvement of education.

In the opinion of this writer, President Mills, like Nkrumah, can build an
indestructible legacy for himself, by undertaking development projects that will
positively impact the lives of majority of Ghanaians.

A curious look at the country will reveal that there are only a few things more
important to Ghanaians than than access to quality education and good health
care. And in a country where literacy stands at about 59.5 %, and people
continue to die in childbirth and from diseases such as malaria and cholera,
President Mills has an inescapable responsibility to ensure that Ghanaians have
access to quality education and healthcare.

Education, especially, deserves special and urgent attention.

Poor educational system

Many years ago, Ghana’s education system was regarded the best in West-Africa.
Kwame Nkrumah as president, had augmented the educational structures put in
place by the British, by building several schools across the country, including
tertiary institutions such as GIJ, UCC and KNUST.

Prominent intellectuals such as the President Mills himself, Busumuru Kofi
Annan, Prof. Frimpong Boateng, Mrs. Bamford Addo, Justice Georgina Woods, Mr.
Emile Short, Mr Ransford Tetteh, Mr. Amissah-Arthur and Dr. Joyce Aryee are some
beneficiaries of that educational system.

These are individuals of impeccable intellectual repute: Busumuru Kofi Annan
remains the first and only West-African to have become the United Nations
Secretary General. Emile Short also, has returned after serving as judge with
the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha,
Tanzania. Professor Frimpong Boateng until recently had been Ghana’s only heart
surgeon. Needless to talk about President Mills’ achievements.Ghana has,
however, had a phenomenal decline in respect of educational standards. Our
educational institutions continue to produce sub-standard scholars, due to
several factors including the lack of basic imperatives for quality education
such as competent and motivated teachers, infrastructure, equipment and
facilities such as classrooms, textbooks and computers.

Public basic schools worst affected
Public basic schools, more so those in deprived areas of the country, are the
worst affected. We continue to hear news of basic schools in this country
scoring 0% in the BECE every year. These children fail not always because they
lack educational facilities or aren’t intelligent but sometimes because they
are being taught by unmotivated and in some cases, lazy teachers who don’t give
their all.

In the words of William Ward, ” the mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher
explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher
inspires.” Unfortunately,what we have in our public basic schools are mostly
mediocre teachers who do not do not give their all. As a result, many students
in basic public schools, more so those in deprived areas of the country, fail to
make it past J.H.S level.

In 2010, for instance, several basic public schools in the country scored zero
percent in the Basic Education Certificate Exams (BECE).
According to the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, ”ten Junior High Schools (JHS)
in the Agona West Municipality and Agona East District of the Central Region had
none of their students obtaining between aggregate six and 36 to gain admission
into Senior High Schools.” Zero per cent effectively!

In Twifo-Heman-Lower Denkyira District, ”fourteen schools recorded zero
percent.”
In Hohoe, ”fifteen basic schools scored zero percent.”
In the ”Jomoro District Five schools scored zero percent.” The list of schools
that recorded zeros goes on and on, rather shamefully.

The zeros recorded by the above schools and several others in the country
effectively denied several hundreds of students the opportunity to gain
admission into secondary schools.

Dashed hopes, shattered dreams
Fundamentally, thousands of children who would have become doctors, engineers,
accountants lawyers, journalists and so on, are forced to either learn trades or
resort to menial jobs to make a living. The rich in society have no problem in
this regard. They continue to enroll their wards in private basic schools where
the quality of education is superior, by miles, to what exists in public basic
schools. The poor, on the other hand, lack the economic capability to enroll
their children in private schools. They have no choice, therefore, to continue
to enroll their children in public basic schools where education is virtually
dead and children are being turned into illiterates.
Essentially, children from rich backgrounds go ahead to obtain good education
which propels them to great heights. While many children from poor homes have to
make do with public basic education which invariably lands them in not very good
places. Some of them become frustrated and they go ahead to smoke ‘wee’ and
engage in immoral and illegal activities such as prostitution and robbery.
To state that public basic education in this country is dead, is stating the
obvious- and President Mills will be building an indestructible legacy for
himself if he aggressively takes steps to resurrect it.

President Mills’ responsibility

If the professor can transform public basic education in the country by making
public basic schools as good as private basic schools, many children who would
have been lost in the ‘forest of illiteracy and uncertainty’, would remember him
as the President whose intervention made it possible for them to acquire quality
education.

He would be remembered, even decades after he has left the Presidency, as the
man who revolutionised public basic education in this country.
John Kennedy admonishes us to ” think of education as the means of developing
our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream
which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater
strength for our nation.”

The President Mills, therefore, has a responsibility to make quality
education accessible to every citizen of this country and not just
a privileged few.

Truth be told, President Mills’ government has made attempts at improving
education in the country: From the distribution of hundreds of thousands of
school uniform and the building of hundreds of class room blocks across the
country to the recent cutting of sods for the construction of two new
universities in the Volta and Brong Ahafo Regions of the country, something is
being done to improve education.

We must acknowledge, however, that first, special attention is not being paid to
public basic education which requires urgent and decisive action. Second,
building classrooms and giving out free school uniforms alone is not enough to
improve basic public education in this country.
The development of educational infrastructure as well as the provision of free
books, uniforms and food, must go hand in hand with a drastic improvement in the
quality of teaching in our basic schools. If not, efforts at improving public
basic education in the country will be futile.
Incompetent and uncommitted teachers must be sacked and replaced with competent
and dedicated ones. A drastic improvement in conditions of service of teachers
is also crucial to improving basic public education in the country. Teachers are
literally crying about poor conditions of service and it’s high time government
paid attention to them.

Conclusion

This writer acknowledges that billions, not millions of dollars, is required to
positively transform Ghana’s education, more so at the public basic level. It’s
important however, that President Mills makes every effort to secure whatever
amount would be required for that purpose.

If Ghana could collaterise oil to the tune of ten billion dollars for loans in
building houses, we must be willing to do more to secure the needed funding for
the improvement of education in this country, because according to Solomon
Ortiz, ”education makes children less dependent upon others and opens doors to
better jobs and career possibilities”.
The benefits of an improved educational system are immeasurable.
The economic success of countries such as South Korea and Singapore, where
literacy stands at 97.9% and 92.5%, respectively, is enough indication that
countries thrive where they invest in their people.

A good educational sector will produce intelligent individuals who will not only
improve the country’s workforce but also take advantage of existing
opportunities, especially in contemporary science and technology, to drive
forward the country’s economic growth. If Ghana succeeds in attaining 90 per
cent literacy within 20 years, the problems of unemployment and poverty will be
greatly reduced, especially when the country has a vibrant private sector that
is in dire need of capable human resource.

There have been many Head of States in this country but not all of them are
remembered for good reasons. In the words of Donald H. McGannon, ”leadership is
action, not position” and President Mills has the opportunity to write his own
legacy by undertaking projects that will benefit the majority of Ghanaians
rather than a few privileged individuals. The improvement of basic public
education in the country is a good way to start.

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