The Acting Vice Chancellor of the University of Education, Winneba, Prof. Anthony Afful-Broni, has lashed out at policymakers for coming out with policies that are not carefully thought through.
He said the haphazard introduction and implementation of policies by politicians especially in the educational sector over the years, has been rendering sound intellectual findings useless.
According to him, rich academic findings in the sector that could help the nation have been abandoned by policymakers because they appear to be serving their own interests, not that of the country.
“The sad one is that you will come here to do all these great deliberations which stem from serious thinking and research that has been done, and the policy makers, quite often, will go about and continue doing what they do”, the Acting Vice Chancellor lamented.
The Professor was speaking on Monday at the 3rd Multidisciplinary International Conference for Post-Graduate students at the University of Education, Winneba.
The Conference, which is under the theme ‘Attaining the Sustainable Development Goals Through Research’, is the third since its inception in the 2015/2016 academic year.
It is a platform for graduate students to meet with others in academia to exchange ideas, critique, probe policies and decisions of policymakers, and make meaningful contribution for the development of the West African sub-region through research academic paper presentations.
In his speech, Prof. Rev. Father Anthony Afful-Broni expressed displeasure about the trend in the nation whereby the academia only hear in the media that government is rolling out policies, disregarding inputs from scholarly research findings.
He further lamented that, “It is quite sad when things that are supposed to be policies are not grounded in research, and so what is the use of what we do here if those who make policies will not come and have conversations with us?”
With specific reference to senior high school (SHS) educational policies in the country, the Acting Vice Chancellor was displeased about how the nation could not have time to fully implement and assess the four-year duration system, saying the SHS system is tossed about anyhow.
He promised to use his office to vigorously engage education policymakers to try to change the status quo “so that what we do in this nation will be informed by research; so that we are not seen as a people who just wake up in the middle of the night and come up with the things that must be implemented tomorrow”.
In a keynote address read on her behalf by a Commissioner of Lagos State, the Deputy Governor of the Lagos State, Nigeria, Idiat Oluranti Adebule, called for effective bonding between all parties in various West African nations to see to the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The SDGs are a global agenda to sustainably stamp out under-development by the year 2030 by covering areas including poverty, health, education, gender equality, water, sanitation, energy and environment.
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By: Joseph Ackon-Mensah/citinewsroom.com/Ghana
