Students appeal for release of allowances

Pg. 31 Fri. April 18/08

Story Rebecca Quaicoe Duho

STUDENTS on the Ghana Government Scholarship under the Year Abroad Programme in Cotonou-Benin have appealed to the Scholarships Secretariat to release their allowances which are in arrears for five months to enable them to carry out their various programmes of study.
They say failure of the secretariat to remit them may lead to a majority of them abandoning their courses, a situation, which they note would mean a waste of state resources.
According to the students, after their first allowance was paid in October last year when they began their training, they have had to resort to pressurising the Ghana Mission in Benin to draw money from its resources to sustain them with the hope that when their allowances were finally released the mission would be reimbursed.
However, for the past five months the secretariat has not made any money available and this has created a difficult situation for the mission’s coffers. The Ghana mission has therefore informed the students of its inability to continue paying them for April because it was cash strapped.
A delegation of the students who visited the Daily Graphic, said the situation was no different from their colleague students in Lome-Togo on the same programme who currently were leaving on food aid of rice and oil, provided to them by the Ghana Mission in Togo.
This they said has made life unbearable for the over 200 students, who are undertaking their scholarship training at the Benin Centre for Foreign Languages of the University of Abomey Calavi.
Last Tuesday, the students sent a petition signed by 207 students to the office of the Chief of Staff and Minister of Presidential Affairs in Accra, to as a matter of urgency intervene in the situation.
The petition was copied to the Head of Mission of the Ghana Embassy in Benin, the Registrar of the Scholarship Secretariat in Accra, the Minister of Education Science and Sports, the Director of the Ghana Institute of Languages, the Head of Modern Language University of Ghana and the head of Department of Modern Language of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology.
It said among other things that some of the students were sick while others were unable to attend lectures because they cannot buy food to sustain them.
The students who started their programme in October last year and received their first allowance within that period, had to put pressure on the Ghana Mission in Benin to pay from their own resources from November to March as the secretariat failed to pay after the first instalment.
But according to the student delegation, the Mission has now made it known to them that they cannot support them for the month of April as their budget was over stretched and hence the students decision to petition the Chief of Staff.
A copy of the offer of scholarship dated September 27, 2007, to the students which was made available to the Daily Graphic, stated among other things that the students were to receive a monthly allowance of CFA 130,000 and book allowance of US$100,000.
When the Scholarships secretariat was contacted, none of the officials there was ready to comment on the issue with the explanation that the Registrar of the secretariat, Mr Fuseini Lancer was indisposed.