November 24, 2024
News
John Dramani Mahama’s election 2020 running mate, Prof. Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, has reiterated that the National Democratic Congress (NDC) did not scrap the controversial teacher trainee allowance but rather replaced it with loans.
According to her, the move was to ensure that the students had access to more money for their upkeep while under training.
She argued that the loans that were granted the teacher trainees were twice the amount that was given to them as allowances.
Speaking at a ceremony at the Wesley College in the Ashanti Region, the former education minister said some persons have claimed in different media programmes that the allowance was scrapped and monies due the trainees were withheld from them but, “I need to emphasize that we never scrapped the allowance. We never took anybody’s money from them. All those who were receiving the allowance, received them till it ended. We gave them the loans that was about twice what they were getting as allowances because we thought they needed more.”
The subject of teacher trainee allowance has recently recently become topical in Ghana’s media following reports that many trainees are owed allowances of more than four months.
This comes at a time where there were threats that teacher trainees would be forced to feed themselves over the non-payment of feeding allowances by the government.
The government has since announced the release of allowances to cater to the feeding of the trainees.
Government is vetting proposals from strategic partners who are seeking to help revive Tema Oil Refinery.
A committee made of officials of the Public Enterprise, State Interest and Governance Authority (SIGA) and Ministry of Energy is vetting the proposals to select the best out of them.
The 45,000 barrels per stream refinery, established by Ghana’s first president Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, is not in the position to refine crude, thereby forcing the oil-producing West African nation to rely largely on imported petroleum products.
The refinery currently rents its storage tanks to Bulk Distribution Companies for a fee.
Since 2017, the refinery has had four Managing Directors with the current being Jerry Kofi Hinson who assumed the post earlier this month.
In October 2021, Ghanaians were shocked following the massive rot uncovered by a three-member Interim Management Committee (IMC) at TOR.
The IMC was constituted by the Energy Ministry after the dismissal of the Managing Director, Francis Boateng, and his deputy Ato Morrison.
The IMC discovered the disappearance of a BDC client’s 105,927 litres of gas oil on September 4, the disappearance of another 18 drums of electrical cables worth GH¢10.4 million from the Technical Storehouse of TOR in April 2021, the wrongful loading of 252,000 litres of Aviation Turbine Kerosene (ATK) instead of regular Kerosene into BRV trucks at the loading gantry between September 21 and 25, the disappearance of the product (LPG) belonging to a client between 2012 and 2015, as a result of which TOR was indebted to the client to the tune of US$4.8 million, as confirmed by an Ernst and Young audit, and loss of naphtha to a BDC client.
In the process, fourteen top management executives were interdicted and are under investigation by the Economic and Organised Crime Organisation (EOCO).
Speaking at a press briefing last week, Energy Minister, Dr. Matthew Opoku Prempeh, said “as a country, we must collectively make every effort to put our refinery back to work.”
The Energy Minister, unhappy about the current state of the refinery, added that “every effort must be made to ensure that TOR comes back to work.”
In his view, if TOR had been refining crude, the benefits to the Ghanaian economy would have been huge.
Apart from guaranteeing job security for the workers, the minister said Ghana would have gotten residual products like kerosene, naphtha and bitumen from processing the crude.
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