Ghana’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Sabah Zita Benson, is calling out Ghanaian students who demand government money long after finishing school as scholarship claims.
During a television interview on Thursday, she labelled these demands “unjustifiable.”
She argued that many scholarship recipients stay in the UK past their graduation dates and still expect the Ghanaian state to pay their living expenses.
The financial scale of the problem is massive, especially among doctoral students. Currently, the government owes this group about £5 million in tuition and stipends.
However, Benson noted that many of those complaining already have jobs and have finished their academic work.
“We have people who have completed their course, maybe in 2023, but they claim that the award letter promised to give them stipends, and so the government owes them stipends, when they were supposed to have completed in 2023, but they’re still here in the UK asking for stipends,” she stated.
Benson shared a recent encounter with student leaders who threatened to protest on April 17.
She discovered that many of them, including the student president, had already defended their theses and started teaching at British universities.
She finds it unfair for people with steady incomes to continue leaning on hardworking taxpayers back home.
“The leadership that I met, the President, my own good friend, Pansa, has completed and defended his thesis. His colleagues have completed, but they are waiting for stipends. And some of them have already started working. They are already teaching in universities here, but they are waiting for taxpayers’ money to offset their stipends for them,” she explained.
The High Commissioner believes a new scholarship law will finally fix this lack of accountability.
Under the new rules, students who choose to stay abroad and work instead of returning to Ghana must pay the government back.
“That is why I believe Article, Section 31 of the new scholarships act is good because for situations like that, if you decide to stay here and teach, then you have to refund the money that we’ve spent on you,” she added.
