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Former Chairman of Parliament’s Finance Committee, Dr Mark Assibey-Yeboah, has urged the government to scrap some of its flagship social intervention initiatives, including the teacher and nursing trainee allowances and the school feeding programme.

He said that the government is currently not implementing these programmes well enough.

According to him, scrapping them will help it save funds needed to salvage the current economic situation.

In addition to the scrapping of these programmes, he said that the Free Senior High School (Free SHS) also needs to be reviewed.

Dr Assibey Yeboah, who made these remarks in a Citi TV interview monitored by GhanaWeb, also suggested that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is likely to ask the government to either scrap or review some of these programmes before it gets the bailout it is seeking from the fund.

“Teacher and nursing training allowances (should be scraped) … It was a campaign message though, but there were so many campaign messages that have not been fulfilled your first term you did it fantastically.

"Do you think Free SHS is the way it is being run is good? When I was talking about feeding fees, my ten years old son, goes to Agape school… their feeding fee for a day is GH¢ 15 for a decent lunch, is my son better than those kids in the public schools (who are given GH¢0.97)? So, if you can’t do it, scrap it. These kids when they don’t go to school on weekends you think they don’t eat at home? It will save you (the government) GH¢ 900 million a year.

“… why should we be paying for boarding facilities and the rest? So, we can shape the Free SHS somewhat. You have the Free SHS bill of GH¢ 1.9 billion a year if you can save let’s say GH¢400 million a year that’s huge,” Assibey Yeboah who is a former New Patriotic Party (NPP) Member of Parliament (MP) said.

He added that scrapping these policies will not have any political consequences on the NPP but will rather help the government get the economy back on track.

Meanwhile, the government has stated that it will protect these social intervention policies as it negotiations for an IMF programme.

The Deputy Finance Minister, Abena Osei-Asare, has assured Ghanaians that there is no way developmental projects and key social intervention programmes will be affected.

She indicated that between 2017 to 2019, the government implemented the school feeding programme despite being under an IMF programme and even expanded it.