The President of the Ghana Publishers Association, Asare Konadu Yamoah, has accused the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NaCCA) of not fulfilling its mandate.

This, he says is due to the flood of some unapproved textbooks in the country after NaCCA on Wednesday began a thorough assessment and scrutiny of the proposed textbooks for basic schools in the country.

Speaking on Top Story on Joy FM on Wednesday, Mr Konadu Yamoah said NaCCA is to be blamed if there are unapproved books in the system.

This he says is because “NaCCA lacks the capacity to assess and approve textbooks in the country.”

“They don’t have enough assessors. They are under-resourced and therefore as we speak currently, they are supposed to rope out the common core textbooks and as we speak, publishers have developed textbooks for the junior high schools – they are unable to send those books to school because NaCCA is not working,” he said.

According to him, NaCCA is not currently assessing books to be approved.

He noted that before NaCCA can be empowered to fulfill its mandate by the law, the Legislative Instrument before Parliament ought to be passed. He added that without the passing of the L. I, NaCCA cannot work.

He stated that the Publishers are unhappy with the way NaCCA assesses textbooks for approval. This he says is because assessing books is a skill therefore NaCCA must train dedicated assessors rather than relying on another person who teaches.

But speaking on the same show, the Director General of NaCCA Professor Edward Appiah said he disagrees with the president of the Ghana Publishers Association's assertion.

According to him, NaCCA is still accessing textbooks hence working.

He went on to say that some publishers have been trained on how to write standard-based materials.

“When we came to the scene, there were a couple of materials that have been sent for NaCCA to approve. We realised that we need to sanitise the system and make sure that we get things right.

“I had an interaction with the publishers and I told them that if you give us some space, we will want to sanitise the space and as I speak, you would realise that they were not even trained how to even write standard-based books,” he explained.