The Minority has taken a swipe at government for owing suppliers of various items like food, stationery and tablets to the tune of six billion Ghana cedis to senior high schools yet at the launch of its manifesto, the ruling party boasted that it had distributed nine hundred tablets to senior high schools as part of the Free Senior High School programme.
According to the Ranking on Educational Committee Peter Nortue, the brouhaha surrounding the distribution is confusing, because some other person quoted the distribution to the tune of ninety thousand, “so I do not know which is which”.
At a press conference on Thursday, August 22, 2024, he noted that, “we in the Minority in our release said we support it very much, but when you are not prepared for it you do not have a budget allocation for it and you go into it you create problem for the supplies”.
Again, we know that one million three hundred and fifty thousand tablet were procured and the supplier has to look for a loan in dollars equivalent to cedis that means that anytime going to pay the loan back they would calculate the rate if it is eighteen cedis to the dollar, that is what they have to pay, and have been denied payment for a long time now and we do not know why government is refusing to pay.
According to him, when the issue came up on the floor during the approval of the formula for Ghana Education Trust Fund, the government was going to shift the payment to GETFund “and we resisted as the Committee on Education recommended that the finance and education ministries take up those payments”.
Speaker Bagbin, wrote to the finance ministry to take up the payment of nine hundred tablet and this has not been done.
“So our concern here is that why is the government refusing to pay for the tablet such that you are killing the business of the supplier; and how many schools have the tablet so far and the number of students who have the tablet so far?”
“You cannot be making noise about distributing tablets, when schools in my constituency have not received these tablets”, he added.
Source: Kwaku Sakyi-Danso/Ecowasnewsonline.com
