Sell All Public Public High Schools...

Financial Analyst Sydney Casely-Hayford says the government of Ghana can reduce its Ghc 9.2 billion public sector wage bill by half, by simply selling all public high schools. The privatisation, according to Mr Casely-Hayford, will save the government as much as Ghc4.5 billion. He says that amount is spent on paying public workers in the education sector alone while Ghc1.6 billion is spent on public sector workers in health. Mr Casely-Hayford made the suggestion when he spoke at a symposium on Thursday on the Ghanaian economy. It was organised by the Today Newspaper. �Sell the Secondary schools and the junior high schools. Sell them. The first one I�ll sell is Achimota Secondary school. [It] will probably generate about 200 million. Have you seen the land? The Achimota forest, in a prime territory, sitting there; look at the land. And that�s what I will do. I�ll sell Achimota. I�ll sell Mfantsipim. I�ll sell Adisadel. I�ll sell Accra Academy. I�ll sell St Louis. I�ll sell Holy Child,� he suggested. He said the people who will buy those schools are the old boys and girls. According to Mr Casely-Hayford, the Government can raise enough money from the sale of the schools and put it into the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund). Acknowledging that privatising the schools would mean paying more for education; Mr Casely-Hayford proposed that such a problem could be circumvented by the Government giving every parent who has a school going child, an education voucher with which they will pay their school fees. That way, the Government will still pay for education but not necessarily run the school, he said, adding that: �Government has shown us all these decades that it is incapable of running the schools and now it has become a financial burden.� Ghana spends about 70 percent of tax revenue on about 650,000 public sector workers in education, health, and other agencies.