Agric colleges to picket MoFA over allowances

Students of the various agricultural colleges across the country have scheduled Wednesday, October 11 to picket at the Ministry of Agriculture (MoFA) to press home their demands of having their student allowances restored.

Stanley Mensah, Students Representative Council (SRC) president for Kwadaso Agric College explained in an interview with Valentina Ofori Afriyie on Class FM’s 505 news programme on Friday, October 6 that students in his school are already in the second week of lectures but they will boycott lectures and collaborate with colleagues from the other colleges to march to the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) which has oversight responsibility over the school.

“We began boycotting lectures last Wednesday, and we are going to continue. If God permits, next week Wednesday [October 11], we are going to stage a mammoth picketing at the Ministry of Food and Agriculture in Accra,” he said.

Government has announced restoration of nursing and teacher trainee allowances, however, students from the agric colleges are furious over what they said was their exclusion from the list of beneficiaries.

According to them, government has reneged on its promise made to them during its campaign in 2016, and several petitions to MoFA to have the issue addressed have proven futile.

“We have gone to the Ministry of Food and Agriculture to meet the Minister himself, but he told us that our allowance was not captured in this year's budget,” Mr Mensah bemoaned.

Allowances for trainee nurses and trainee teachers, as well as students in the various agric colleges were scraped by the erstwhile Mahama administration with a reason to increase student enrolment in the various training colleges, but the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in its manifesto, promised to restore the allowances.

According to Mr Mensah, the protests will not end until government signs a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to make students from agric colleges beneficiaries of the allowances.