A new scholarship bill to be known as the Ghana Scholarship Authority Bill will be laid before Parliament when it reconvenes as government takes drastic measures to restructure the current Scholarship Secretariat.

The Minister of Education, Haruna Iddrisu, who announced this in Accra, said the new Bill would prevent cronyism and nepotism, and provide scholarships to those who truly deserve them.

“Apart from dealing with cronyism and nepotism and giving scholarships to those who are undeserving, the emphasis will be on merit, and also help our institutions to build faculties that can compete with the rest of the world,” Mr Iddrisu stressed.

The new arrangement, he said, would start with an effort to build strong faculties for Ghanaian universities, with a new local scholarship scheme on the table.

“We will be initiating, with your support again, what I call the local scholarship initiative,” he said during the inauguration of the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund) Board of Trustees in Accra last Friday.

“In your formula that you will soon review, I said that some provision be made so that at least each public university in Ghana will have some minimum support to support the pursuit of five PhDs locally.

“You can make this an institutional part of the fund so that in the next four years, we will boast that these were PhDs trained by the Ghana Education Trust Fund,” he suggested to the trustees.

The minister said: “I am happy to note that President Mahama has requested that as soon as Parliament convenes, I lay before Parliament a new scholarship bill to respond to the negative cronyism and nepotism associated with the award of government scholarship.”

Recently, the Scholarship Secretariat was accused of offering scholarships to beneficiaries based on negative cronyism and nepotism, a development President John Dramani Mahama hopes to correct with the new bill.

GETFund scholarship

While awaiting the ratification of allocations, the GETFund has earmarked GH¢266.2 million for continuing and new beneficiaries of its scholarship.

The figure is about a GH¢90.2 million increase on the previous year’s allocation, which was GH¢176 million.

Mr Iddrisu reminded the trustees that they remained a primary source of what went into the scholarship secretariat.

Natural calamities

He proposed to the trustees to consider making some allocation that would respond to natural calamities, saying such a fund would have responded to the fire disaster which occurred at the Labone Senior High School (SHS).

Explaining the rationale for the emergency fund for Members of Parliament (MPs), the minister, who is also the MP for Tamale Central, recounted the challenges and frustrations parliamentarians went through daily in their constituencies.

He cited an instance where a month ago the roof of a school at Zobo, a village in his constituency, was ripped off.