The University Teachers Association of Ghana (UTAG) has said that ordinarily, the government’s plan of establishing five additional universities to augment the existing ones should be welcome news as it expands access to higher education for all Ghanaians, however, given that all existing public universities are seriously underfunded and suffering from severe infrastructural deficits, coupled with undignifying conditions of service for public university lecturers, they strongly submit that this should not be a priority for the government.
It is recalled that President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo indicated that the government was going to establish five Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) universities across the country.
The STEM universities, he said, would be sited in the newly created regions namely Western North, Savannah, North East, Ahafo and Oti regions.
Delivering the 2022 State of the Nation Address (SONA) on Wednesday (30 March) in Parliament, Akufo-Addo “Government is in the process of securing financing for the construction of five (5) STEM universities in five (5) new Regions, that is Western North, Savannah, North East, Ahafo and Oti regions. Steps are being taken to turn the planned Bunso campus of the University of Environment and Sustainable Development into a standalone, independent University focused on the study of Engineering. Construction of this campus is set to begin within the next three months.”
“The TVET institutions are being upgraded and equipped to enable them train the increased numbers of children that we want to be attracted to that sector to meet the modern needs of our economy,” he added.
But in the view of UTAG, to improve the quality of tertiary education, the government should rather apply such resources to improve the conditions of the existing public universities through the expansion of infrastructure, improvement in working conditions of university lecturers, recruitment of more Lecturers, research support and the payment of subventions, which they said the government has reneged as a responsibility to all the public universities.
“This should be the focus and priority of the government now. We note the non-provision of seed grants for establishing new universities in recent years, such as UniMAC, CKT-UTAS, SDD-UBIDS, AAMUSTED, UESD, and others.
“We loudly call on the government to focus on providing seed funding for these universities to thrive and provide a conducive teaching and learning environment for our members and students in these universities,” a communique they issued after its 21st Biennial National Congress at the University for Development Studies (UDS), Tamale, from the 11th to the 13th of October 2023, UTAG said.
In the area of the work of the Constitution Review Commission, UTAG said it finds the non-implementation of the reviewed 1992 Constitution very troubling.
UTAG says it takes exception to the very partisan challenge of policy discontinuity that plagues Ghana’s efforts at development and violates the Directive Principles of State Policy that enjoins regimes to continue with programmes initiated by previous regimes as much as possible.
It is recalled that the NDC administration under the later Professor John Evans Atta Mills put in place a Constitutional Review Commission (CRC).
The CRC recommended comprehensive amendments to the Constitution. The government issued a white paper on the report and rejected some of these recommendations.
The accepted recommendations were translated into proposals to amend 97 articles of the 1992 Constitution by the Constitutional Review Implementation Committee.
“We note that having spent state resources to set up a Constitution Review Commission of Inquiry in January 2010 to undertake such a crucial exercise of nationwide public consultations culminating in a report submitted to the government in December 2011 and the issuance of the White Paper in June 2012, Ghanaians are yet to see real efforts from successive governments to implement the recommendations of the Commission.
“This is unacceptable given the difficulties of the current times where the practice of executive authority almost veers into the realms of authoritarianism, as well as the inefficiency in governance due partly to the enormous responsibility placed on the shoulders of the executive President.
“Thus, the deliberate stalling of Ghana’s constitution review process does a great disservice to the quest for good governance and sustainable development and the general improvement in Ghanaians’ physical quality of life.
“Based on the foregoing, we call for an immediate resumption and completion of the constitution review process to strengthen the fundamental laws of Ghana for good governance, inclusiveness, and sustainable development that ‘leave no one behind’,” UTAG said.