It was a successful NUGS dinner and I commend the NUGS President and his team for all the efforts especially bringing high profile personalities like the Education Minister to grace the occasion. However I must state that I was disappointed that the Minister of Education decided to use the rare opportunity of engaging student leaders to tell us stories than to dive into the current array of issues bedeviling students of this country.
I was also unhappy that we decided not to officially draw her attention to at least mention the issues that matter most.
But I pray next time we will take notice of this because if we fail to seize the little opportunities to fight for the student good, then the apathy will deepen and in future we will have to work extra hard to redeem our image even among our colleague students.
Kudos to the NUGS President for the initiative, it’s a good one even though I didn’t like the idea of the President chairing his own dinner that he is organizing. I admired his calm throughout the period because believe you me, I couldn’t help but to heckle the Minister thinking she will even talk a little about the current issues in education such as:
1. Teaching and learning materials for basic schools
2. School fees for senior high schools
3. Getfund subventions not being paid
4. The negligible amount paid as thesis grant for postgraduate research students
5. The level of progress for the 200 day senior high schools
6. The destiny of free SHS
7. The recent publication that government is not thinking of letting students pay for utility (at least some assurance verbally)
8. The GetFund Board which is taking too long to inaugurate
9. The 2014 promise by government through the budget to provide 50,000 laptops for freshers at the tertiary level, of which we did not even see one and yet we cannot tell where these monies went.
And a host of other issues that we believe our Sector Minister should have taken time to at least address some of them for us.
I love NUGS and and I love the students of Ghana just as we all claim we do, but let us go beyond our claims of fighting the student cause and actually fight it.
My name is PD and am on the side of the Poor Student.
