Former Deputy GES DG, Dr. Bempah Tandoh, has revealed that Dr. Yaw Adutwum’s leadership style negatively affected Free SHS implementation.
According to him, the former education minister relied heavily on his expertise as an educationist while relegating the technical support of education professionals he met at the ministry.
This, he believes, had a damning impact on the policy, which was rolled out in 2017 and implemented seamlessly by Dr. Mathew Opoku Prempeh.
“As a minister of education, regardless of what you know, you work with the technical people on the ground. The biggest challenge was that because he felt he was in education, he could do it.”
To him, the exclusion of these technical minds undermined the implementation of Free SHS.
He indicated that these challenges were not faced during the tenure of Dr Mathew Opoku Prempeh, who sought the technical know-how of the people he was working with at the ministry.
“Post Dr Mathew Opoku-Prempeh, that camaraderie of bringing everybody together was absent. And unfortunately, that impacted Free SHS and its quality that we saw in the first term of Akufo-Addo’s administration. Sometimes we were not even invited to boardroom meetings. The technical skills were not leveraged,” he stated in an interview on Accra-based Channel 1 Television.
