Managing Editor of the Insight newspaper, Kwesi Pratt Jnr. says he is not only shocked and scandalised by the pettiness that has greeted President John Mahama's announcement of progressively implementing the free SHS policy beginning 2015, he also finds claims that the New Patriotic Party introduced the concept as false, fraudulent and without basis.

Firstly, the NPP should be jubilating that the very idea they may have introduced, if that were the case, has been found  worthy of implementation by their political opponent, except if they want to tell the whole world they only deserve to implement good things.

Kwesi Pratt who was speaking on Radio Gold's Alhaji and Alhaji at the weekend, said while education dominated issues in the 2012 elections, it is also a fact that the NPP's ticket to power was free senior high school, "so that there came a time in the campaign when you ask any NPP activist any question, the answer was ‘Free SHS'".

So key was education as part of the campaign that it was natural to become topical after the president's State of the Nation address last week during which he announced the rollout.

"But my brothers, I am completely shocked and scandalised by the pettiness in these discussions, and to start with, I am not going to contest the claim that free education is something over which the New Patriotic Party has the patent. I am not going to contest that claim. I am not going to contest the claim that until the New Patriotic Party spoke in 2012, no Ghanaian had ever heard about free education, I’m not going to contest that claim. Free SHS, I assume for now, is the creation of the New Patriotic Party. Let us assume that that is the case.

“Now if that is the case and government comes and says that what you thought was good for Ghana, huh. I also agree it is good for Ghana and I'm going to implement it, why should the NPP be angry? Or are they telling us that they are the only people who should do good things? And that anybody who does any good thing apart from them, commits a crime, I cannot believe this. Indeed if I were in the NPP and I believe that I was the originator of the free Senior High School policy, I would be jubilating. They should have been jubilating that the government finally has come to accept that free Senior High School is something which is workable and is something which can benefit the people of Ghana and therefore is going to be implemented.

'But you see. that assumption, that Free Senior High School is something that the NPP introduced, is itself false. It's false, it's fraudulent, it has no basis.”

Pratt said he went to school for free, and even in the early seventies when he enrolled at the Ghana Institute of Journalism to study Journalism, he was virtually paid to go to school while tertiary education in those days was also free and others were even paid to take certain courses.

Free education therefore cannot be anybody's invention, certainly not after 1992, "and it is something that the Ghanaian people have enjoyed before and we can enjoy today and enjoy in the future."

Pratt said he does not see why the NPP should be crying when it is clear, that from the 1992 Constitution, we are already late to implement the policy even at the tertiary level.