The flagbearer of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), John Dramani Mahama, has criticized the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) for its failure to supply textbooks to students, years after revising the curriculum for basic education. He argues that this failure is hindering educational equity.
Speaking at the Ghana National Association of Private Schools Week launch under the theme, “2024 Elections: The Private Education Manifesto,” Mr. Mahama voiced apprehension regarding the insufficient provision of school materials for basic students.
“I believe I am who I am because my father gave me a good foundation to attend Achimota Primary School to become what I have become.”
“But you cannot say so for a child in the rural school who probably doesn’t get the same opportunity. And so we need to look at the equity in the education system and see how we can improve investment in poor rural schools. Some of them have no chairs and curriculum has changed. Four years now, the curriculum has changed yet no textbooks are available for students and teachers,” he quizzed.
Stakeholders within the educational sector have over the years been appealing to the government to make textbooks available for students and teachers to enhance teaching and learning activities.
President Nana Addo announced the implementation in September 2019 and indicated that the new curriculum would focus on making children confident, innovative, creative thinkers, digitally literate, well-rounded and patriotic citizens; but the reality is that pupils are direct victims of the frustrations of teachers who do not have the learning materials to teach..
The future of the nation’s educational set-up looks very worrying. The various sector stakeholders strongly believe Dr. Adutwum acknowledges the relevance of textbooks in the process of implementing a new curriculum effectively in the basic schools; however, the political will to execute this very important policy has been in limbo for the past three years.
Like John F. Kennedy, 35th president of the USA, once said: “As we express what deeply we acknowledge, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.”
Since the change in curriculum came into effect, there have been several dates announced by either the education minister, Dr. Adutwum, or the communication team of the ministry of education which sincerely, time has proven that the people of Ghana should have taken those announcements with a pinch of salt.
After three years of implementing a new curriculum without textbooks, amid a sporadic shortage of chalk and other essential teaching/learning materials, the spokesperson of the Education Ministry, Kwesi Kwarteng, showed up at the beginning of the year to announce that the distribution of textbooks for the new curriculum will start in March 2022.
We are currently in the third week of May and there is no sign of textbooks for our basic schools. After following the activities of the sector closely from the early weeks of implementation of the new curriculum, I can sincerely conclude that the pressure being mounted by student leaders, civil society organisations, and many Ghanaians on the government to provide textbooks, will only be meaningful to the Ministry of Education and the Ghana Education Service in 2024.
In 2022, the gov’t wasted money raising giant billboards with captions like: “Free textbooks for basic schools, remember us.”
The politics of procurement was indicated to be one of the major reasons for the delay in providing textbooks by Dr. Yaw Adutwum on the floor of parliament in late December 2021.
The flip side of the excuse given by the education minister on the floor of parliament is that the politics of procurement has a good relationship with the reward system of campaign financiers and political party financing officials. Undoubtedly, one of the biggest educational pending projects is the absence of textbooks for a new curriculum. It will be a huge fortune for the party financiers who will win the bid to supply the textbooks.
It appears the MoE and Ghana Education Service (GES) are applying the principle of a great public relational mechanism instead of realistically addressing the unavailability of the textbook. It is a sad reality that a government is waiting till 2024 to build a political capital out of the absence of textbooks for a new curriculum they introduced.
