Exactly two months ago, from this writing, the officially fingered plagiarist and former graduate student of the social science at the University of Ghana, who had his Master of Sociology Degree withdrawn by the Academic Council of the country’s oldest and most prestigious tertiary academy, and who presently doubles as both the ruling National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament for Tamale South, in the Northern Region, and the John “Nkokonketenkete” Dramani Mahama-appointed Education Minister, Mr. Haruna Iddrisu, took to the august Floor of Ghana’s Parliament and smugly and pontifically declared that the Government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) was in the “revolutionary” process of recruiting and/or hiring some 50,000 direly needed professionally trained public schoolteachers to fill up a gaping shortage of K-Through-12 personnel, in order to bring the dismal quality and the standard of the country’s public school system to par with what prevailed around the world via “Best Practice” regime (See “We Need a Minimum of 50, 000 New Teachers Across the Country – Education Minister” Modernghana.com 7/29/26).

The multimillionaire business who is also alleged to be the owner of several Division-One Football/Soccer Teams in the country, almost immediately exposed the cheap and sheer canard of his aforesaid promise by categorically stating, within the same breath, that the Mahama-led Government of the National Democratic Congress was, after all, merely playing a very familiar game of Peek-a-Boo with the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens and the electorate, because the ability and the capacity of the Government to successfully meet its recruitment target of some 50,000 schoolteachers, at the barest minimum, was perfectly in limbo because it was directly contingent on the availability of adequate funding allocated to his Ministry by Dr. Cassiel Ato-Kwamena Forson, the Minister of Finance and Economic Planning.

So, right here, from the get-go, as New Yorkers back here in the proverbial Big Apple or Gotham are wont to say, Mr. Iddrisu had already given the metaphorical lie away. You see, the fact of the matter is that if the Mahama-led Government of the National Democratic Congress were really serious about recruiting a direly needed 50,000 professionally trained teachers, the Minister of Education would have maturely, intelligently and constructively consulted with his Finance Ministry counterpart, to hash out any rough edges of this otherwise very progressive policy initiative well beforehand, and not so cavalierly and insolently presumed that he could insult the intelligence of Ghanaian parents and guardians with children and wards in the country’s public school system.

Very likely, our filthy rich former Mahama-appointed Labor Minister who led the globally infamous “Looting Brigade” that literally emptied the vaults of the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) in the waning months of the first tenure of President Mahama, between 2015 and 2016, has his children and close relatives enrolled and attending privately owned and run schools, perhaps even domiciled abroad.

Now, if, indeed, it is true that the nation’s public school system is chockfull of the so-called Community Teachers – in my youthful days, that is, during the 1970s and the 1980s, they were called Pupil Teachers, then, of course, it goes without saying that the promise to recruit some 50,000 professionally trained educators, at the barest minimum, to fill the yawning vacancy in our public school system is sheer hogwash; and that is to charitably sum up Mr. Iddrisu’s unarguably empty promise. Which is also precisely why the “Honorable” Minister of Education would almost immediately both preempt and contradict himself at the same time by stating, characteristically and unabashedly that, to-date, the 24-Hour pontificating Mahama regime is able to only assure the recruitment of a relatively and ginormously measly “7,000 teachers across the country,” with “close to [some] 3,000 lectures” being recruited and/or hired to fill an equally yawning gap at the nation’s tertiary academies.

But, of course, this is not really the problem that the entirety or the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens and residents ought to worry themselves silly about, as it were. Rather, the real problem has to do with the very fundamental ability and the capacity of the Mahama Government to adequately take care of the contractually ratified working conditions of our professionally trained teachers and educators at all levels of our public education system, a critical percentage and a significant majority of whom have not been paid their basic salaries for months and years on end.

You see, most mature, adult Ghanaian citizens are well aware that when it comes to the critical subject of the nation’s public education, the Mahama-led ragtag Government of the National Democratic Congress is decidedly a “No-Go Area.” Yet, they lamely keep ceding these professionally trained political scam-artists their sacred mandate every election season. Of course, those of us with bigger and much sharper eyes are already well aware of the deal that really went down at the polling stations throughout the country during the 2024 General Election, about which Yours Truly has written and published enough articles and columns to fill up several books and doctoral dissertations.

No wonder, then, that dozens of relatives and acquaintances have been literally swamping the “Inbox” of my E-mailing system with disconsolately despondent remarks and comments about how Ghana under the aegis of the Mahama-led regime of the National Democratic Congress has decidedly and effectively become an inexpressible joke of the Twenty-First Century.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]