Clement Apaak, a member of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) Manifesto Committee on Education, has defended the party’s proposal to scrap academic fees for all first-year students.
During the NDC youth manifesto launch in Accra on Monday, August 12, the party’s flagbearer, John Dramani Mahama, promised to introduce the policy to support struggling students.
In an interview with Bernard Avle on the Citi Breakfast Show on Citi FM on Tuesday, August 13, the Builsa South lawmaker explained that the gap between the number of WASSCE graduates and those who advance to tertiary education is often due to financial constraints.
He argued that the proposed policy aims to address this issue if the NDC wins the upcoming general elections.
“One of the challenges students face is their ability to pay fees and it has recently become obvious that the number of students who write WASSCE and proceed to the university is not encouraging and this is because the money to pay fees is a problem.
“When we engaged with youth groups on how to resolve this, waiving off fees for first-year students came up strongly.
“From the figures that we have, if we are to go by some information that has been put out by our good brother Kofi Asare of Africa Education Watch, they estimate that if one was to look at the number of students who took up places in tertiary institutions in the 2023/2024 academic year, they are less than 200,000 and when you look at the academic fees of first-year students on average, it works out to anywhere between GH¢2,000 and GH¢2,300 thereabout.
“So if we were to use that as a base, we could posit that the policy will cost less than GH¢300 million a year and of course, student numbers fluctuate each year, so it is doable and if we were to pluck revenue loopholes, we should be able to mobilise the resources to fund this proposal.”