Teacher trainee allowance still scrapped

11:59 - 14 October 2016

President Mahama explained that the government has only restored the allowance of the nursing trainees.

Allowance of teacher trainees has not been restored.

This was said by President Mahama to clarify the current reports which suggest that allowances for both teacher and nursing trainees have been restored.

President Mahama made this clarification when he was addressing students of the University of Ghana as part of his campaign tour of the Greater Accra Region.

“By withdrawing the allowances we have increased by 63 percent the number of young people who want to train as teachers. And infrastructure has also been expanded. This is often confused with the issue of nursing allowance. The nursing trainees were going to put on the student loan scheme but we realised that the students’ loan act does not allow for their institutions to benefit from the loan and so we are amending the act, as soon as that is done, they will also be put on it.”

President Mahama on a tour in the Brong Ahafo Region in August mentioned that they had restored the allowance of the nursing trainees.

President Mahama said “the committee recommended that since we are yet to amend the law to put our nursing and midwifery students on the students loan scheme, we should also put them on the allowance.”

But he explained that they have not restored that of the teacher trainees because they have been upgraded to tertiary status where degrees are awarded.

“We have upgraded the colleges of education into tertiary status and the fact is you can’t eat your cake and still have it; if you eat it, it is gone. And so you want to be colleges of education to award degrees like the others but at the same time we should discriminate against them and continue to pay you allowance while they take students loan. And so even on the basis of equity, it was important for us to replace the allowance with the loan so we can create equity.”

Meanwhile at the manifesto launch of the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) the 2016 Vice Presidential Candidate of the party described the decision to restore allowance of the nurses as a pure political gimmick.