Former President John Dramani Mahama has expressed shock over the suspension of the headmaster of Tempane Senior High School, describing the Akufo-Addo government as highly intolerant.

The Upper East Regional Education Directorate suspended the headmaster, pending investigations, after accusing him of allowing Mr Joshua Akamba, a National Organizer hopeful of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), access to students who shared their challenges with him.  But according to Mr Mahama, the action taken by the authorities is a clear testimony of the intolerance of the NPP government.

He said “investigating him for what? The schools have children who are 18 years and above and they vote and in our time in office, we allowed the opposition to go to the schools because there are voters in the schools. But that is the problem with NPP, they are highly intolerant”.

Mr Mahama noted that the things that the NDC government took for granted, the NPP government is not taking those things for granted, hence suspending the “poor” headmaster.

The former President said this when he addressed delegates of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) at the Wa Campus of the University for Development Studies, as part of his three-day campaign tour of the Upper West Region.

He expressed the hope that the headmaster would be exonerated adding that, “the investigators should know that they, in opposition, did the same thing; they went into the schools and did politics”.

He said when the NDC was removing schools under the trees, leaders of the NPP would locate new ones, stand there and take pictures just to discredit the work that the government was doing but nothing was done to them. Mr Mahama also accused the NPP of always trying to take cheap political advantage, by attempting to take issue with his recent interaction with students of the Wupili Senior High School, in the Northern Region. He explained that the students who had closed from school saw his convoy and blocked him by the roadside, prompting him to talk to them.

He said it was just an advice he gave to the students to be studious and hardworking. He was therefore surprised that the NPP issued a statement to lie and accuse him of going to a secondary school to dabble in partisan politics with students. Mr Mahama also condemned a recent viral video where some SHS students were sitting on the floor to learn, wondering why government cannot buy desks for the school after it has been built by the NDC government.

Mr Mahama also asked, “what happened to the promise by the NPP to give each school child an egg and chocolate?”

Listen to Mr. Mahama in the audio attached: