Former Deputy Director-General of the Ghana Education Service (GES), Dr. Kwabena Bempah Tandoh, has blamed the leadership style of former Education Minister, Dr. Yaw Osei Adutwum, for undermining the effective implementation of the Free Senior High School (SHS) programme.
Dr. Tandoh accused Dr. Adutwum of sidelining education experts and relying excessively on his personal expertise in decision-making.
Speaking on Face to Face on Tuesday, September 9, he said, “As a minister of education, regardless of what you know, you work with the technical people on the ground. The biggest challenge was that because he felt he was in education, he could do it,”
He contrasted Dr. Adutwum’s leadership with that of his predecessor, Dr. Mathew Opoku-Prempeh, whom he credited with consistently engaging technical teams in shaping policy.
“Post Dr. Mathew Opoku-Prempeh, that camaraderie of bringing everybody together was absent. And unfortunately, that impacted Free SHS and its quality that we saw in the first term of Akufo-Addo’s administration. Sometimes we were not even invited to boardroom meetings. The technical skills were not leveraged,” he added.
According to Dr. Tandoh, the exclusion of experts from key policy decisions under Dr. Adutwum ultimately weakened the quality of Ghana’s flagship Free SHS programme.
