The Vice-Presidential Candidate for the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Prof. Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang has for the first time addressed the famous propaganda the NPP use on her, that she was the one who cancelled the Teacher Training Allowance.
In an interview on Live FM, Naana maintained there was the need to scrap the payment of allowances and replace it with the loan scheme because the Training Colleges were upgraded into Tertiary Institutions and therefore had to be put on the Students Loan Trust fund for Tertiary Students.
There were a number of people who were qualified but were at home. These people wished they would have been given the opportunity to join their colleagues in school. So we said that ok now the Training Colleges are now Colleges of Education so the Certificate Issued to them are the same as what is issued to the students of the University of Education and UCC and the do not take allowance, So we asked what was done to students in Cape Coast and Winneba and we realized they take student loans. So, what we did was to contact GETFUND and Ministry of Finance to increase the allocation for the loans so that all the schools that have been given the tertiary status will be given loans instead of the allowance.
Before we introduced the loan Scheme for the Colleges of Education, we gave one-year notice that those who be enrolled in the next academic year, this is how we will be handling them. The Students Loan Trust Fund designed a programme which I was a part of and hey went to all the Colleges of Education to educate them on how to fill the forms and they combed the whole country to do this and yes, the students took the money.
Those who were taking the monies already were still taking their allowances. The second-year students did not have their allowances cancelled. They took the money till the completed their academic work. So, if any individual comes to say that we took their monies from them by cancelling the allowances, it’s shocking. Reports that we took their allowances from them are lies. The allowance for teacher trainees was not cancelled, it was replaced. We heard them using several words like allowances have been scrapped, even the media shocked me, they should have come to ask but they also helped to peddle the falsehood,” she said.
SOURCE: www.Ghgossip.com
