I’m pretty sure Free SHS has a place in Bawumia’s heart, I don’t know about Mahama

By implementing the Free SHS, the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia administration has admirably upheld the international human rights provision on free universal secondary education, which is encapsulated in Article 13 of the International Covenant on Economics, Social and Cultural Rights.

In recent times, concerned Ghanaians have been questioning the sustainability of the Free SHS implementation due to the obvious challenges.

Of course, like any other policy, the Free SHS has its own challenges.

However, on the preponderance of probability, the positives outweigh the negatives within the Free SHS implementation.

That being said, the Free SHS skeptics are within their democratic right to grouch, shrill, and criticise as they see fit. After all, isn’t freedom of opinion and expression part and parcel of democracy? I am afraid, it is.

The process of development – human development – in the form of Free SHS, should at least create an environment for people, individually and collectively to develop to their full potential and to have a reasonable chance of leading productive and creative lives.

We should, therefore, not lose sight of the fact that by implementing the Free SHS, the NPP government is graciously working towards the reduction of the canker of poverty in Ghana.

Make no mistake, education drives the development of a nation, therefore the logical approach to improving accessibility and quality is not through political rhetoric and unfulfilled promises, but through well-thought-through policies such as the Free SHS.

Considering the enormous benefits therein education, it was, indeed, prudent and somewhat forward-thinking for the NPP government to seek to bridge the ever-widening social inequalities chasm through the rational distribution of national resources in the form of Free SHS.

Notwithstanding the fact that the erstwhile Mahama administration squeamishly left behind a huge debt stock amid harsh socio-economic standards of living, it was, indeed, commendable for the NPP government to afford to implement the seemingly admirable, albeit costly social intervention such as Free SHS.

If we stroll down memory lane, one unique campaign message that dominated the 2008, 2012, and 2016 general elections was the poverty alleviation Free SHS.

While candidate Akufo-Addo and his NPP were promising to implement Free SHS if voted into power, candidate Mahama and his NDC were all over the place campaigning vigorously against the policy.

Regrettably, however, Ghanaians mistakenly bought into NDC’s ‘sugar–coated message’ in two consecutive elections (2008 and 2012) and turned down the seemingly advantageous Free SHS offer.

But lo and behold, on 7th December 2016, the good people of Ghana saw the light and gave the Free SHS ‘promiser’ (Akufo-Addo) a massive endorsement.

To his credit though, within a year into his four-year mandate, President Akufo-Addo estimably implemented the Free SHS to the delight of Ghanaian parents and their children.

Disappointingly, however, no less a person than Ex-President Mahama conveniently and persistently criticised Akufo-Addo for implementing the Free SHS policy, allegedly, at the expense of other developmental projects (see: ‘Free SHS crippling other sectors-Mahama, classfmonline.com/ghanaweb.com, 24/02/2018).

Sometimes, one cannot help but convivially applaud some of our politicians for their incredible adroitness in the systematic propagation of propaganda intended to either hoodwink or proselytize unsuspecting Ghanaians into accepting their parochial agenda.

Former President Mahama is quoted to have lamented during one of the NDC’s unity health walks: “The problem this government is facing and it is in their own
interest is that Free Senior High School is absorbing all the fiscal space they have and so almost every money you have, you are having to put it into Free Senior High School.

So you can’t pay District Assemblies Common Fund, you can’t pay NHIS (National Health Insurance Scheme), you can’t pay GET Fund (Ghana Education Trust Fund), you can’t pay other salaries and things because all your money is going into Free Senior High School.”

Given the circumstances, observers can draw an adverse inference from the preceding criticisms that Mahama does not fancy the Free SHS, and therefore he is not ready to spend a huge amount of money to run the policy.

It is, therefore, not the least surprising that Mahama and the minority NDC operatives prefer “progressively free” (whatever that means) to NPP’s comprehensively free.

In fact, unless I come across as the worst performer in mathematics, I cannot fathom how and why the NDC’s ‘Progressively Free SHS’ of GH48 per student could be better than the NPP’s GH2844.27 per student a year.

The poverty alleviation-free SHS policy aligns with the United Nations' vision of human development and the right to development.

It must be emphasised that per the right to development, development is shifting from the conventional approach to the human rights approach, whereby the focus is on equity and social justice (Mansell and Scot 1994).

It was against that backdrop that the international community agreed to work synergistically to assist the underdeveloped nations in line with the provisions of the UN Declaration on the Right to Development.

So far there have been concerted efforts by the international community to concretise the Right to Development by creating Sustainable Development Goals to develop a global partnership for development.

As the international community implements and monitors the 2030 Sustainable
Development Goals agenda, the human development approach remains useful to articulating the objectives of development and improving people’s well-being by ensuring an equitable, sustainable, and stable world.

In essence, human development – or the human development approach- is about expanding the richness of human life. It is an approach that is focused on people and their opportunities and choices.

Human development, in reality, focuses on improving the lives of people rather than assuming that economic growth will lead, automatically, to greater well-being for all.

In other words, human development is about giving people more freedom to live lives they value. In effect, this implies developing people’s abilities and giving them a chance to improve upon their lives.

Basically, human development is about more choices. It is about providing people with opportunities in the form of Free SHS, for instance.

The human development approach, developed by the economist Mahbub Ul Haq, is
encapsulated in the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s work on human capabilities, often framed in terms of whether people can “be” and “do” desirable things in life.

Examples include Beings: well fed, sheltered, and healthy; Doings: work, education, voting, and participating in community life (HDR 2015).

Since 1990, 2 billion people have been lifted out of low human development, and extreme income poverty has been reduced by more than a billion. Every region of the world has seen Human Development Index (HDI) gains (HDR 2015).

Some of us, as a matter of principle, will continue to sing the praises of the NPP government for graciously bequeathing the Free SHS to the generations yet unborn.