Go to Court -Minister tells NUGS

The very affable Minister for Education, Youth and Sports, Kwadwo Baah-Wiredu (MP) has dared the National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS) to drag government to court over the delay in payment of arrears into the Ghana Educational Trust Fund (GETFund) if it so desired. His sector has nothing against the union’s stand.

The Minister who assumed responsibility over the Ministry some one month ago promised that in spite of the fact that he is new in the ministry and not privy to all the facts as far as the issue of the GETFund is concerned, he will not stand in the way of NUGS if it wants to go to court.

For him, “going to court is the best way of doing things in every society because it provides an opportunity for everybody to be heard.” He told the Network Herald “We’ll therefore not stand in the way of NUGS if they want to go to court over the GETFund matter, it is better for the nation to do that so that we can get a precedence from the judgment.”

Mr. Baah-Wiredu however challenged the students to make the facts and figures of the GETFund saga available so that notes could be compared to determine whether indeed, the government of the NPP deserves to be sued over the matter. In the meantime, the government will commit itself to ensuring that education moves on. The Network Herald had published in May this year, a threat from the student body to take legal action against the government over the non-payment of monies earmarked for the GETFund.

They accused the government of failing to account for some 550 million cedis being arrears that had accrued over the past three years. The Union had given the government up to July to pay up the arrears or be prepared for the consequences. “We remain resolute in our struggle to ensure that the GETFund runs effectively and efficiently and come July, if the government fails to pay the money, we’ll have no other option but to go to court to dialogue,” NUGS president, Edward Omane Boamah told the Network Herald.

The Union hinted of the availability of certain some high profile lawyers who are more than ready to take up the matter at the appropriate time.

Meanwhile, the Network Herald has learnt that the head of the legal team of the Ministry of Finance met with the leadership of NUGS last Tuesday. The agenda was to explain the issues pertaining to the delay in the payment of the money into the GETFund and to prevail upon the Union to rescind its decision to take legal action against the government.

Our information is that, the head of the legal team holds the view that the government could not be sued over the matter, but NUGS maintains it will go to court come July if government failed to pay up the arrears.

NUGS says although the representatives of the Ministry of Finance have assured of government’s commitment to education and indeed, the payment of the arrears, it considers the assurance as one of the lip services they have been treated to all these years because the commitment is not supported by the figures in the budget.

The student’s representative body maintained its stance on cost sharing with a vow to “ resist the full cost recovery, with a highly disciplined non-violent civil disobedience.”