This what president of Ashesi University thinks about free SHS

While the country's Constitution mandates governments to work towards making education free for citizens, the parties have proposed differing strategies towards achieving this.

It was the biggest bone of contention during the 2012 campaign season. While the NPP proposed free senior high school education for all, President Mahama argued against a blanket implementation. On the contrary, he promised to build 200 community day schools towards making secondary school education 'progressively free'.

Many educators have waded into the debate over the years and the latest to do so is Patrick Awuah Jr, the founder and president of Ashesi University; one of Ghana's leading private higher education institutions.

In an interview on the Ghana Report show this week, he was asked by an audience member about his thoughts on the controversial policy and his response appears to endorse some aspects of the way President Mahama is taking education.

"The way you do progressively free in my view is to build more schools and as you build more schools, you lower the price steadily. So you have supply going up and price dropping and by the time the price is zero, there are enough seats for everybody. If you set it to zero before you have enough seats, there is going to be two possible outcomes.

“[First] is, you overcrowd the classrooms and the second is, you leave it the way it is, but even though it is free, it is still competitive to get in and the people who are going to get in are the middle class and the wealthy from private primary schools. So you would have just made education free for people who could have afforded it.”

President Mahama in 2014, in an address to Parliament, announced that his government would be making education free for senior high school students.

After nearly four years in office, less than 10 percent of the schools that were promised have been completed. Many are still under construction.

Last month, Mahama announced that students in the boarding school system would from August benefit from the Free SHS policy. This comes after those in the day school system had been attending for ‘free’ for a year.

However, Patrick Awuah does not believe this is the way to go.

"I think we need to be very practical, very pragmatic about education. We should take the view that this is where we are and this is where we want to be. And then we take steps every year to get there. [But] when we try to do everything as one, and you don’t implement it well and it is very difficult to implement it all at once. Then you have problems. And right now, we have a problem."

In what Awuah describes as ‘a stepwise approach’; he proposed what he believes the free SHS should look like.

“[We should build] community day schools and we are going to build it in rural areas; near where the kids live. And the kids who go to those community schools are going to go for free. The kids that go to the national schools like Achimota and Wesley Girls will pay for it.”

“That is a stepwise approach where you have made sure that you are not giving free education to people who could afford it but you have also made sure you are very targeted in making it free for the people who need it and made sure that those people actually have the seats and that they have teachers there that are going to teach them.”

The opposition NPP has accused the government of bad mouthing the policy for votes only to steal it when they assumed office. The NPP has also accused the government of not implementing the policy well and has promised “to revive and truly implement the Free SHS policy for the benefit of all Ghanaians."

It appears, free education will continue on as a major campaign point four years after it divided the country.

Patrick Awuah has recently been voted as the second most influential person in Ghana.