News

We’ll demonstrate if Registrar at Scholarship Secretariat is not sacked – Students with Special Needs

A group called students with special needs at the University of Ghana (UG) is calling on President Akufo-Addo to sack the Registrar at the Scholarship Secretariat over what they describe as incompetence.

In a press release dated August 28, 2023, the group stated that the Registrar of the Scholarship Secretariat must be removed with immediate effect.

“We the concerned students with special needs at the University of Ghana wish to impel the government of Ghana to eject or expel the registrar of the scholarship secretariat from office as a registrar with immediate effect as a matter of urgency owing to his glaring display of colossal incompetence and dereliction of duty on his part as a registrar.

“It has become more than imperative for us to scrounge at the doors of the president of the republic to take this decision in his own interest or else face the most mammoth demonstration in the history of the country against his government by special needs students across the country.

“As a person who did my first degree here at the University of Ghana, I never heard any time where the bursary delayed for more than three consecutive years with no reasonable explanation,” Leader of the Group, Gilbert Boateng Agyare stated.

“We wish to apprise the government that for more than three years running, all students with special needs at the University of Ghana totaling about 200 have not received their bursary due to fundamental flippancy on the part of the registrar towards the issues of special needs students in the country.

In case you do not know much about the bursary, then let me crave your indulgence to brief you on it.

The bursary is some small allowance given to persons living with disability who are in the tertiary institutions every year by the government to ameliorate the bad financial conditions of such people as a form of social assistance policy to reduce poverty and improve the standard of living, however, we have not received our portion for three years so all our current students from the first year to the final year have never received a dime since they stepped foot on campus.

Closely linked to the above challenge, is the issue of school fees being paid by the government through the scholarship secretariat for special needs students.

Exactly one year ago, the scholarship secretariat held a program at the University of Education which as special needs students we attended in our numbers upon their invitation.

During the program, it was enunciated by the secretariat that they were going to provide free tertiary Education for special needs students by paying our tuition in full.

After this announcement, we have been waiting on the Scholarship Secretariat for this laudable policy to manifest in our lives by getting our tuition paid by the government as promised, but counterintuitively, the government seems to be reneging on its own promise which was not coercively made or made under any intense pressure.

We do not understand why we should be chasing the government to do what it has pledged to do.

Unless this promise was made by government without carefully or shrewdly cogitating on it to see how feasible or utopian it can be achieved, we cannot fathom why government has turned a deaf year on all our attempts to get the money paid.

Source: Today.com.gh