Editorial (The Daily Searchlight, May 12, 2022)
The National Conference of Principals of Colleges of Education – Ghana (PRINCOF) has directed that teacher trainees begin to fund their own feeding from May 8.
This directive is in response to the inability of Colleges of Education to make payments for food items supplied to them.
According to PRINCOF, food suppliers who had continued delivering supplies to these Colleges of Education for months without payment have finally withdrawn their services till they receive the monies owed them.
“Most Colleges now have food items that can last only one week if students are to be provided with three (3) meals a day,” PRINCOF said in a letter to the Education Minister.
To this end, PRINCOF has suggested that:
“Trainee teachers will be provided with two meals, breakfast and supper only for one week, from April 23 to April 30, 2022.
“Trainee teachers from May 1 to May 8, 2022 shall be given lunch only.
“After May 8, trainee teachers would be asked to provide their own meals until their feeding allowances have been paid,” it said.
Meanwhile, food vendors are being encouraged to increase the quantity of daily meals they cook for sale to students.
“These measures are meant to ensure that there is no disruption of the academic calendar,” it concluded.
The Daily Searchlight wonders at the rationale for the continued feeding of students undertaking professional education as teachers. While we would agree that Ghana needs teachers, we believe that the converse is that these people are being given training that would ensure them life-long careers.
To our mind, the money being used to feed them, and indeed the students at Senior High School would be better deployed if it is dedicated to improving salaries of teachers and instructors in the public schools, increasing access to education at all levels, improving the quality of that education, and putting in place a loan scheme that the students can pay back when they start working.
The Daily Searchlight believes that the culture of freebies that we have deliberately cultured in the minds of Ghanaians, is directly responsible for the poverty of the people when it comes to thinking and innovation.
We believe that it is about time Ghana rethought the policy of offering free feeding to so many sectors of the population.
(This article was first published in the column EDITORIAL of the Daily Searchlight of Thursday, 12th May, 2022. The Daily Searchlight appears on the newsstands of Ghana every working day and for sale online twenty-four hours a day all day throughout the world on www.ghananewsstand.com).
