Member of Parliament for North Tongu Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa has taken a swipe at the vice president, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, over his free laptops for SHS students comments.
The outspoken MP wrote:
Vice President Bawumia has apparently created another crisis for his government with his Free Laptops for SHS students announcement as government struggles to finance the Veep’s latest wish list.
The crisis has led to government failing once again to present the 2023 proposed GETFund Formula to Parliament this week for approval despite featuring on Parliament’s Order Paper for Wednesday June 7, 2023.
With the NHIA and DACF Formulae approved by Parliament much earlier, thus before the Easter break, the current troubling situation represents the longest period it has taken for a GETFund Formula to be presented to Parliament by any government since the GETFund was established by the NDC in the year 2000.
Insiders say Bawumia’s free laptop promise will cost government at least GHS1.4billion, however, after 6 years of mismanaging the GETFund, only some GHS200million is expected to be available in the fund this year.
Government’s conundrum now, thanks to Bawumia’s incorrigible appetite for populist promises, is where to find the GHS1.2billion deficit; plus how to find additional resources to settle other GETFund commitments including paying agitating contractors, how to fulfill legal obligations at the basic and tertiary levels, how to clear arrears of suffocating SHS food suppliers, how to pay for textbooks already ordered, how to redeem scholarship demands from various countries and how to complete the numerous GETFund abandoned projects across the country — obviously not an easy task at a time of IMF austerity.
Negotiations between the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Education and GETFund as to how Bawumia’s latest albatross could be accommodated have been rather tempestuous, to put it mildly.
Objectively, after gross mismanagement and the dubious daakye bond experiment, GETFund was already comatose but it’s only logical to conclude that Bawumia’s ‘kwatrikwa’ free-laptop-affair was the last whimsical pronouncement that left GETFund completely lifeless.
Source:Mybrytfmonline.com/Kwabena Nyarko Abronoma
