Executive director for Africa Education Watch (Eduwatch), Kofi Asare, has revealed that government has displayed its inability to aptly finance feeding under the free senior high school program.
According to him, the picketing of members of the National Food Suppliers in the country due to debt owed them is not the best. He indicated that government has a track record of not paying debt owed when it comes to suppliers.
Mr Asare explained that there’s hardly a quarter without drama and government is aware of the legacy debt it is building within the food sector of the free senior high school programme.
“Well, I think that first of all, it’s obvious government has demonstrated tremendous incapacity to effectively finance the feeding aspect of the free senior high school program… It is time to have a conversation about financing feeding in senior high schools. We can’t continue to pretend that these legacy debts are great.”
Kofi Asare
Reacting to the rejection by the suppliers in relation to government’s intention to pay half of the GHC270 million owed members, Mr Asare noted that the association members must move from the era where they engage on contractual issues with “emotions, charity and sympathy”.
He stated that per their contract with government, if government has refused to honour its obligations for over two years, then they should be in court by now.
“Let’s begin to engage our contracts and get government to do the right thing, through the lawful procedures. We know that most of these contracts are given to political faithfuls, so some of them will not like to go to court. But sympathies cannot enforce the obligations of government and so let’s go to court if you feel your rights under the contract has been injured by government”.
Kofi Asare
To address the issue, Mr Asare urged the ministry of finance, ministry of education and ministry of agric to issue a statement on the matter. He explained that the various information being put out by various institutions will have to cease.
“We can only know what and how much has been paid to Buffer Stock and what it was used for if the ministry of education issues a statement or makes a pronouncement on same in parliament. So, let’s see what happens in parliament. We hope that we find finality to this matter.”
Kofi Asare
Relevant ministries urged to issue statements on debt
Justifying his reason, the Eduwatch executive director highlighted that it has been silent on this issue for the past week because it wanted the ministry of education to pronounce on the matter, since it fell squarely on its lap. With this, he revealed that the education think tank is now communicating and sharing its opinion because there was a meeting yesterday between the minister and the association of suppliers.
“We need to have a statement issued by the minister for education regarding the outcome of meeting he held with the food suppliers. We need to also have another statement issued by the management of Buffer stock after the said meeting with association members as claimed by PRO.”
Kofi Asare
Furthermore, Mr Asare indicated that the formal communication on the outcome of such meetings are important for public discourse. This, he stated, is because he sees a lot of incongruity and distortion in data being put forth by various parties and various platforms.
“If you read the statement issued by the association, in paragraph two, they claimed that the ministry is saying that they have paid all the GHC280 million owed them and added another GHC35 million or so by January this year.
“Which means that the ministry is not indebted to them so far as debt as of 31st December, 2022, is concerned. Meanwhile, in the last but one paragraph of that release, they said that the ministry is saying that it is working with the finance ministry to make payment to them.”
Kofi Asare
Also, Mr Asare highlighted that the issue of debt is a symptom of a problem and as usual, government is nowhere near solving the problem of poor financing of feeding under the free SHS programme. He emphasized that the “symptomatic” approach to problem-solving, in the education sector is not sustainable.
“The problem is that there’s liquidity issue. The finance ministry is not able to raise money to pay for food supplied by buffer stock suppliers and all the time they are creating legacy debt in the senior high school value chain…”
Kofi Asare
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