I must comment that I was at the Policy Dialogue mentioned in this write up. Yes the presentations are fairly captured here. However I feel compelled to respond to at least some component of the write up: "What he discovered at the University of Ghana, he says, was “absolute chaos”: it had 151 separate bank accounts, up to 10 students sharing a bedroom and not even a functioning water system.". Now I do not know where the “chaos” comes in here. Until one understands the situation of the Ghanaian Tertiary Terrain it is easy to write off some actions as erratic and un-achieving. In the period that Prof. Shattock was consulting, the University of Ghana was participating in several donor funded programs. Given the record of developing countries in the management of Donor Funded Programs, the World Bank and most funding agencies directed that all projects running and being funded by Non-Ghanaian Aids should be run through independent accounts. This has resulted in several accounts being opened as and when a donor grant was approved for a tertiary education institution in Ghana. Also, Government of Ghana funding is released across two main trenches, which Administration and Service in one trench and infrastructure on the other. For auditing purposes, most institutions run these releases through different accounts.
Now my first submission has looked at funding from Donors and Government. There is another source of income flow, which institutions need to manage thus resulting in several accounts. The case of student fees and dues. Once again, University of Ghana is our yard stick. It is an institution with over 9000 students enrolling per year (and this figure is not factoring in students on the distance education programme). In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s student intake rose dramatically in the public tertiary institutions, thus from a few hundred students widely dispersed across the country, the institutions were now enrolling more than 2000 per academic year. There was no point at this time for the University of Ghana for example to stick to one banking platform to receive student fees. The logical thing to do was to spread its payment system to embrace the then expanding financial sector of Ghana. This spread has resulted in the so called “chaos” of 115 accounts but has helped ease the payment of fees by students. I remember having to queue as a fresh man for 5hrs just to pay my school fees. Now it’s a walk-in-and-walk-out and where internet banking is available, one can even sit at home and complete payment and registration of fees. One should also not forget that University of Ghana like Oxford, Yale and Harvard has several Colleges under its management. All these colleges are quasi-independent institutions with their own administrative structures; thus requiring individual banking lines and platforms. Yes the idea of an institution running more than 100 accounts may seem chaotic, and yes I do believe that there is need to cut down on the number, but I wish there was information to show how many of these accounts are still valid or operational as at the time this article was being made or even at the time Prof. Shattock made his observation. I do not seek to defend the situation, but only to present the reader with the other side of the coin.
On the issue of running water, at the time Prof Shattock was consulting, University of Ghana was in the middle of a huge infrastructural evolution and as such most of the old internal piping system had been disabled. And I am glad that in his 2013 presentation he forwards that the situation has greatly improved. I do believe that University of Ghana and most Tertiary Education Institutions in Ghana are infrastructurally better off than the average community in Ghana.
I must say yes the paper did outline the issues well; however the situation is not as bleak as it seems. We are a working progress and if donor agencies were not to present developing countries with a “one size fits all” approach to resolving our institutional problems, Ghana’s Education Sector would advance faster and further than it has. Note this is my opinion and shall be mine only (http://radikaltinka.blogspot.com)
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