The NDC never abolished trainee allowance – Opoku-Agyemang

Professor Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang, the NDC’s Vice Presidential Candidate for the 2020 elections, claims that the John Mahama administration never abolished the teacher trainee allowance.

People’s claims that the allowances were removed as a result of their difficulties in school, according to the former Minister of Education, are lies that should be ignored.

“Education should never be treated as a matter of expediency, that is dangerous,” she told members of the NDC’s Tertiary Education Institutions Network (TEIN) student wing at Wesley College in Kumasi on Sunday, April 24. Because education is about the future, you must make the best decisions possible. It is about your future, all of you young people sitting here.

“It’s important to note that we never did away with the allowance, and we never took anyone’s money.” Those who were receiving allowances continued to receive them until they ran out. So the people who went on the air and said they couldn’t pay their fees because of their allowance were lying. I was saddened by the fact that young people were able to do so because no one took their money. We gave them a loan that was roughly twice their allowance because we thought they needed it.

It’s unclear why she’s saying this because former President John Dramani Mahamaa justified the cancellation of teachers’ allowances while speaking to students at the University of Ghana during his 2016 campaign for reelection in the Greater Accra region.

“We upgraded the colleges of education to tertiary status, and the truth is that you can’t eat your cake and keep it; once you eat it, it’s gone.” So you want to be colleges of education, awarding degrees like everyone else, but we should discriminate against them and keep paying you allowance while they take out student loans. So, even if we didn’t have any equity, it was critical for us to replace the allowance with a loan in order to build equity.

“By eliminating the allowances, we have increased the number of young people interested in becoming teachers by 63 percent.” In addition, infrastructure has been improved. This is frequently misunderstood in relation to the issue of nursing allowance. “We were going to put nursing trainees on the student loan scheme, but we realized that the students’ loan act does not allow their institutions to benefit from the loan, so we are amending the act, and as soon as that is done, they will be put on it as well,” the President explained.

It is recalled that shortly after taking office, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo announced that teacher trainee allowances would be restored on September 12, 2017.

He explained that the reinstatement of the allowances is part of the government’s efforts to provide high-quality education through the free SHS program.

In 2017, Mr. President said this at the West African Senior High School (WASS) in Accra during the launch of the Free SHS program.

“The teacher is at the heart of this policy’s prospects. In order to provide quality education, a well-trained, confident, and content teacher is required.

“It is clear that quality teacher training is vital to our nation’s development if we are to succeed as a nation and accept that education is central to national development,” he said.