The National Communications Officer of the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) Sammy Gyamfi has challenged the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) to disclose how many ‘schools under trees’ they have eliminated since taking office in 2017, rather than debate figures the previous NDC administration achieved.
“It does appear that our NPP friends prefer to debate us on whether or not, the NDC eliminated over 3000 or 1,714 schools under trees, instead of telling us the number of schools under trees that their government has eliminated since assuming office in 2017,” Gyamfi said in a Facebook post on Monday, April 8.
Sammy Gyamfi was responding to claims from an NPP supporter which sort to debunk NDC’s assertion that it eliminated over 3,000 schools under trees between 2009 and 2016.
The figures cited by Krobea Kwabena Asante of the NPP revealed that the NDC, according to the 2016 budget statement, only moved 1,714 schools under trees and not 3,000 as Sammy Gyamfi had earlier stated.
However, the NDC spokesperson argued the figures being cited did not capture the full timeline and that documents from 2013 and 2016 supported the NDC’s claim of eliminating more than 3,000 such schools.
“The 2016 budget statement was presented to Parliament on 13th November, 2015. This date is apparent on the front page of the 2016 budget statement. (Find attached, a screenshot of the front page of the 2016 budget that captures the date the budget was read in Parliament).
“It should therefore be obvious even to the uninitiated, that a budget statement presented in the year 2015, could not have given a comprehensive account of the total number of schools under trees eliminated by the erstwhile NDC government by the end of 2016,” asserted Sammy Gyamfi.
“As I indicated earlier, it’s an indisputable fact that the NDC eliminated more than 3,000 schools under trees between 2009-2016. This was captured in the 2013 SONA and the evidence-based green book on the Education sector published by the Ministry of Education in the year 2016. To put the figure above 2,000, is just me being conservative,” he stressed.
Source: modernghana.com
