Prof. Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, John Mahama’s running mate in the 2020 election, has reaffirmed the assertion that the National Democratic Congress (NDC) did not abolish the controversial teacher trainee allowance, but rather substituted it with loans.
According to her, the change was made to guarantee that the students had more money for their needs while in training.
She said that the loans issued to teacher trainees were twice the amount given to them as allowances.
Speaking at a ceremony at Wesley College in the Ashanti Region, the former education minister stated that some people had claimed on various media programs that the allowance had been scrapped and that monies owed to trainees had been withheld from them, but “I need to emphasize that we never scrapped the allowance. We never took anybody’s money from them. All those who were receiving the allowance, received them till it ended. We gave them the loans that were about twice what they were getting as allowances because we thought they needed more.”
Following claims that many trainees are due allowances of more than four months, the question of teacher trainee allowance has lately been a popular topic in Ghana’s media.
This comes at a time when there have been fears that teacher trainees will be forced to feed themselves due to the government’s failure to pay feeding allowances.
The government has recently announced the disbursement of allowances to cover the trainees’ feeding costs.
SOURCE: CITINEWS
