Apaak defends feasibility of free university for first-year students

Clement Apaak, a member of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) Manifesto Committee on Education, has defended the party’s proposal to eliminate academic fees for all first-year university students.

According to him, the policy is doable, as it will cost less than GH¢300 million annually.

The Builsa South legislator explained that the disparity between the number of WASSCE graduates and those who progress to tertiary education often stems from financial constraints.

He therefore called on Ghanaians to vote for the NDC government on December 7, 2024, to cushion all first-year students with the payment of their fees.

“One of the challenges students face is their ability to pay fees and it has recently become obvious that the number of students who write WASSCE and proceed to the university is not encouraging and this is because the money to pay fees is a problem.

“When we engaged with youth groups on how to resolve this, waiving off fees for first-year students came up strongly.

“From the figures that we have, if we are to go by some information that has been put out by our good brother Kofi Asare of Africa Education Watch, they estimate that if one were to look at the number of students who took up places in tertiary institutions in the 2023/2024 academic year, they are less than 200,000 and when you look at the academic fees of first-year students on average, it works out to anywhere between GH¢2,000 and GH¢2,300 thereabout,” he noted in an interview monitored by The Ghana Report on Citi FM.

He continued, “So if we were to use that as a base, we could posit that the policy will cost less than GH¢300 million a year and of course, student numbers fluctuate each year, so it is doable and if we were to pluck revenue loopholes, we should be able to mobilise the resources to fund this proposal”.