A government comes into power and after consultation or evaluation, it finds a certain instituted scheme that grants allowances to student nurses unnecessary or unaffordable, so it scraps it to the disappointment of students.
Across Ghana, various student nurses and bodies protested and cried to the government—clearly indicating that scrapping the allowance would increase student hardship and it would become excessively expensive to train as a nurse.
But the government couldn’t care less, and it insisted it decision was right and somewhat final.
Undeniably, this decision together with several others have made the ruling NDC government very unpopular among students in Ghana and therefore it’s not much of a surprise that with 4 months to the next election, the government has suddenly taken a walk back, partially reinstating the allowance it scrapped.
Even though the government has not reinstated the allowance to the amount nurses were receiving before, the timing of this U-turn is suspicious—obviously to score political points and to be frank, it will greatly work since Ghanaians “don’t think far.”
Now, Ghanaian student nurses will receive 150 GHS a month—far less than what they were receiving before but at least, half a loaf is better than none.
A student nurse commenting on this to GhanaCelebrities.Com said:
Awwwwww……the Gov’t has given only Gh150 a month instead of the Gh430 and the annoying thing is reports all over say ‘Govt has restored the scrapped nursing trainee allowances’ which is never true.
To win any sort of political power in Ghana, you must be a brilliant demagogue—and cleverly, the NDC government is a champion of this.
Ghana’s political lunacy is particularly interesting: because a few months to elections, every thing becomes so perfect in Ghana and then after the election, the clock begins to tick backwards. Despite the blatancy of this absurd political tactic, it seems to work all the time.