Last Wednesday in Parliament, Mr Mahama Ayariga, Member of Parliament (MP) for Bawku Central, wrote to the Speaker of the House, Rt. Hon. Alban Bagbin, to request the House to move a motion to suspend the Fees and Miscellaneous Provisions Instrument, 2019 (LI 2386) for the 2021 Academic Year.
Mr Ayariga, in his letter, asked the House to request that the President takes urgent steps to suspend the payment of admission fees by new entrants and continuing students into public tertiary institutions for the 2020-2021 Academic Year.
Mr Ayariga said the suspension of the fees should form part of the national COVID-19 relief programmes being implemented by the government.
Readers will recall that the Akufo-Addo-led government introduced the Covid-19 Relief Programme to cushion Ghanaian businesses from the impact of the pandemic.
According to the Bawku Central MP, payment of fees for the 2021 Academic Year should be suspended and captured under the COVID-19 Relief Programme. One of the arguments made by the legislature was that economic conditions of the country at the time Parliament approved the fees had changed in the light of the devastation to household incomes engendered by COVID-19 and other factors.
He argued that most sectors of the economy had been hard hit. For instance, the hospitality sector has been devastated, in that a lot of hotels, restaurants, eateries and others for most parts of the year 2020 couldn’t operate due to the pandemic, and this has really affected their income levels.
He said though most of them are now operating, the sales they make are very low because occupancy rates in these times have become very low.
He also noted that other sources of income for most families in Ghana have been remittances from abroad. He indicated that, as we all are aware, Covid-19 affected Europe and America, and has affected the ability to remit back home.
We at The Chronicle support the arguments being made by the legislature to suspend the payment of fees for the 2020-2021 Academic Year. We are very much aware of the negative impact of the disease on most Ghanaian bread winners.
According to results from a new COVID-19 Business Tracker Survey conducted by the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the World Bank, about 770,000 workers (25.7% of the total workforce) had their wages reduced, and about 42,000 employees were laid off during the country’s COVID-19 partial lockdown. The pandemic also led to a reduction in working hours for close to 700,000 workers.
Ghana was a beneficiary of the International Monetary Fund’s Rapid Credit Facility. Also, the government established the COVID-19 Relief Fund to cushion businesses and households that were hit by the pandemic, which saw private individuals and companies making donations. We believe that it will be prudent for the government to leverage these funds, support tertiary students, and to suspend payment of the fees for now.
We, at The Chronicle, are also urging the government to find innovative ways of administering the student loan, so that students can get access to the monies on time, to enable them use such monies to cater for their registration and admission fees.
This would solve the issue of students being denied admission into our various universities because they are not able to afford the fees.
Education should be made accessible for the youth, and all financial bottlenecks must be removed. The Chronicle hopes that the government will listen to the cries of suffering parents by alleviating their plight in the face of the pandemic.
The post Editorial: Removing financial bottlenecks in tertiary education is a must! appeared first on The Chronicle Online.
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