The Politics of the Northern Scholarship Scheme

It has been pointed out that the Northern Scholarship Scheme was a political tool used to woo the Northerners to join the crusade for independence from colonial rule (Gbadamoshi 2016). When the first president of Ghana was going round the country canvassing for support from the independence agendum to come to fruition, the Northerners said they were not ready as there was a developmental gap between the North and the South and that they will only join the match for independence on condition that something was done to bridge the gap between the two sides (Brukum 1998). Thereon, the Northern Scholarship Scheme has come under serious attacks that threaten its very existence (Songsore et al. 2001). These attacks come from some people from the South who argue that poverty is not only in the North but can also be found in some parts of the South. Gbadamoshi recounts a sitting of “the justice Adade Committee’’ which was set up to find out whether the

NSS should continue and he was in attendance where it was strongly argued that it should be scrapped (Gbadamosi 2016). To further make a point that other parts of the country equally needed such a scholarship, Bening (2015: 441) reports that members of parliament from the Brong- Ahafo Region (a region in the South) led by the member from Wenchi East, C.S Takyi demanded a special scholarship for their people because of the fact that their economic standing was largely like that of the North. However, their request was not granted by parliament with reason that: “establishment of special scholarships for individual regions or states in the country was bound to militate against the oneness of whole Ghana’’ (Bening 2015:446).

As time went on, there had been suspicion and anxiety that the scholarship scheme could one day be cancelled. Barely two years after the policy was instituted it is reported by Bening (2015:446) that Mumuni Bawumia, who was then member of Parliament for Mampurishi area made a submission in parliament which was symptomatic of the suspicion of the scholarship being scrapped: “The special Scholarship Scheme for the North is not operating satisfactorily and I am quite sure it will die a natural death.’’ Despite the fact that all has been hazy about the future of the scholarship, there has not been a Government with the political courage to cancel it. A respondent shared his view why it is not easy to scrap it even though it has some challenges:

You see, there is no Government that will come and have the political will to cancel this policy. The politics of Ghana is such that a Government will need the support of the North to win election and any Government that will temper with this policy will lose votes from the North. The North can decide to do block-voting against such a Government. That tells you why if a party or a presidential candidate is from the South, that party will try to get somebody from the North to be the vice presidential candidate. That is how we are wired politically here in Ghana.

(SHN 14, 21.07.2016)

This apparently has been corroborated by Gbadamosi (2016) when he asserted that:

The truth is that, in the past 57 years of Ghana’s independence, no democratically elected Government could have brazenly cancelled that scholarship without thinking of the risk of losing votes in the area. That cannot be divorced from the fact that the two biggest parties in Ghana have now (2015) agreed that the whole country should enjoy free senior high school attendance.

(Gbadamosi 2016: 157-8)

The politics and fight against the policy by some southerners continued as Rahim Gbadamosi shared another meeting he attended where the cancellation of the policy was discussed:

There was another occasion when the issue was raised at a meeting of Directors of Education when the late Mr. D.V. Owiredu was the Director General of the Ghana Education Service. He discounted the notion that there were other poor communities in the South and so the scholarship in the North should be scrapped. He said, even on that basis alone, the issue was about a vast area of the country afflicted by endemic poverty. He said pockets of poverty here and there in the South were nothing to compare with the situation in the North. He said, rather than cancel the scholarships scheme for secondary students in the North, it would be more reasonable to consider extending it to pockets of poor communities in the South (Gbadamosi 2016: 157).

In the same vein I reached out to participants to find out what might happen to the North if the scholarship scheme comes to an end one day. There was a strong disagreement with the cancellation of it as attempts had been made by some governments in the past to scrap it (Bening 2015; Gbadamosi 2016). When I asked for his opinion of the state of development in North if the scholarship is cancelled, one of the respondents had this to say:

Ahh!! For the North, either the progress in terms of human resource development will be stagnated or we will be taken back

and the gap between the North and the South will further widen.

Because in the South they have royalties, in fact, if you are not a lazy person in the South, you will earn a living. Here in the dry season in the North, you can hardly earn a living (SHUW 9, 15.10.2016).

These concerns raised by this respondent were views held by some people in the Northern part of Ghana. Poverty is the bane of development in that part of the country and if this educational policy is taken away from them, it stands to exacerbate the situation. According to the Ghana living Standards Survey (GLSS), the regions of the North are comparatively the poorest regions in Ghana (GSS 2013).

It was also held that the Northern Scholarship Scheme ought to continue because of the imbalanced nature of natural resource-endowment and other opportunities that the Southern part of Ghana is much favoured with. Here, one headmaster explains:

There is a gap which we already all know. Even if people don’t talk about it but down south there are some other scholarships but here in the North, this is the only scholarship we seem to enjoy. So if you scrap it, we are going to further widen the gap because they have Cocoa Board Scholarship which we don’t enjoy and most of the business companies are there. Mining companies are down there.

They have a number of scholarships (SHN 4, 21.07.2016).

The sentiments of some of participants were that in addition to the many resources (including cocoa which is not grown in the North) that the Southern part of Ghana is endowed with, they also have the Cocoa Marketing Board Scholarships which are awarded to some of their children. The Cocoa Marketing Board Scholarships are instituted to cater for the children of cocoa farmers in the Southern part of Ghana.

According to the respondents, majority of the people who work on the cocoa farms are northerners who usually migrate to the South in the lean season who are not covered by the Cocoa Marketing Scholarship Scheme. They therefore, see this arrangement as unfair once cocoa is largely produced in Ghana through the toils of some people from the North. This was well articulated by one of the respondents:

[…] that is why I always say that when they talk of the cocoa farmers, the Northerners are the cocoa farmers. But if they say cocoa owners I know that the Southerners own the cocoa (SHUE, 6 24.08.2016).

Upon all these concerns regarding the instability of the policy, its implementation was still in progress. However, there were a couple of challenges that thwarted the full impact of it. The next section discusses these challenges that were arrived at through the Q methodology.

5.3 Intractable Educational Inequalities in the Face of a Policy Intervention