Reading these words from Thomas Piketty's 2015 book, "The Economics of Inequality," led to the musings that follow it in this write-up: "Thus, negative results such as Coleman's, rather than bolstering the opposition to state intervention to redistribute financial resources to disadvantaged neighborhoods, suggest a need for more radical redistributive methods, such as redrawing school zones to require parents from different groups to send their children to the same schools (given the impossibility of requiring them to live in the same neighborhoods). …In theory, it is therefore possible that everyone would benefit from social integration, but such a social equilibrium cannot be achieved without collective coercion."

The Free Secondary High School (FSHS) policy, introduced by the Akufo-Addo government in the early years of his presidency, made a political sonic boom. The promise of the scheme, with no complete details of how it would be funded and executed, was the source of major political advantage in a political culture that does not always ask for details.

FSHS had the potential to significantly transform Ghanaian society for the better, had the thinking about execution been more long-term oriented, and more holistic in engagement. The key word here is "had." With no reasonable doubt, the policy has had the impact of increasing quantitative access to education; on the face of it, a good outcome.

What is less seriously discussed, though it should, is the qualitative distortions introduced by this policy. Though budgetary allocation jumped significantly - and one is deliberately not cluttering this think-piece with figures - the evidence of commensurate improvements in quality of outcomes is thin, precariously so.

Perhaps for fear of political victimisation, the debate about the deterioration of quality is rather muted - even among the principal actors in the implementation ecosystem. It is not too difficult to work out why this can be the case in a Santa Claus democracy. Every comment, each remark,  any granular reviews, no matter how well-intended, is viewed with partisan suspicion by political actors fixated on the incessant and obsessive electoral calculus of winning votes. So, government employees - which in the end is what public sector educators are - face many of their woes in silence.

But even official silence cannot hide forever the impacts of severe economic strain. Who is being fooled when we call something FREE, say even parents who can afford to pay fees should not, and the entire system ends up being defunded? When real per‑student spending is falling, class sizes in many public schools are bursting past 60, and WASSCE pass rates are flatlining despite record enrolment, only wilful self‑deception allows anyone to claim that expanded access has produced expanded quality.

I have watched in horror, as routine operating expenditures of public schools are now shifted to alumni associations, with all the attendant dangers. This is not the time and place to develop the points about the dangers fully.

At a meeting of the Bar Association in Kumasi, Akufo-Addo gave a startling response when asked to consider exempting families who could verifiably afford to pay fees from FSHS. The proposal was that the FSHS intervention would yield better socioeconomic impacts if it was focused on those who in all sincerity could not afford to pay.

This proposal accords with my own views. I have never understood why a person who can afford all the luxuries of the nouveau riche - from holidays abroad, through vintage liquor, luxury cars, palatial residences,  all manner of exquisite fashion accessories, and many other objects and items of abject extravagance, should have their wards school fees paid by poor people's taxes.

Akufo-Addo's startling response at the time, was that those who claimed to be able to afford to pay such fees should (voluntarily) move their wards to the private education stream. That, by doing so they would unburden FSHS to focus on poor(er) people. 

To me this was an illogical clash of cymbals, if not a veritable clash of development gears. It represented a considerable misunderstanding of the role of public education in the elimination of egregious inequity in society. A dangerous blind spot, if this was not simply an utterance fuelled by defensiveness, that is.

It is easy to derive, even from first principles, and also from the experiences of several of the earlier post-independence generations, that high-quality public schools become a homogenising melting pot in society. Public schooling, everywhere it is properly designed and implemented, is a promoter of social mobility, because it transfers capabilities even to the disadvantaged. Public education is a foundation pillar of stability in society.

So, to ask the rich to create their own exclusive avenue, leaving the public system desiccated, bereft of funding, and the captive zone of only the poor, is to dangerously accelerate the creation of a class society. This obvious point does not need to be belaboured.

Our own history has too many examples of lifelong friendships formed in our school system, between some who got there from mud huts and others who arrived from palaces and mansions - the rich and the poor mingled and often came out alike. Sometimes, those friendships resulted even in marriage. The Ghanaian public education system has historically made a great contribution to social cohesion. 

That this seemed lost on Akufo-Addo was nothing short of baffling. At the time the impression was given that his successors would introduce significant reforms to iron out these creases in the policy implementation. Two years in power, his successors have talked the talk about this, but there is very little real and concrete evidence of change. The Santa Claud democracy is after all shaped for performative rhetoric, not to achieve radical improvements.

The danger posed by the class bifurcation happening in the education system is a menacing structural risk to the medium and long-term social cohesion of Ghana. One that many seem aware of but ignore in the hope that, like the perennial Accra flooding problem, it will someday simply disappear - by some miracle.

If we are serious about development, this a matter that deserves a national conference to forge a binding consensus among the people of Ghana themselves. A conference process that in its build-up is inclusive in the broadest and most functionally effective sense possible, not just something that ends up promoting elite interests. This is both an urgent and an important matter.