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Claim: Ayawaso West Wuogon MP Lydia Alhassan has said that her tenure as MP has led to the historic construction of the first senior high school in her constituency.
Verdict: This is misleading. There is already a privately run Senior High School in the constituency. Therefore, when completed, the one under construction by the government will not be the first in the constituency.
Full Text
Member of Parliament for the Ayawaso West Wuogon constituency, Lydia Seyram Alhassan, has claimed that her tenure as MP has resulted in establishing the first senior high school in the area.
Speaking on Accra-based Citi FM, the lawmaker contesting for reelection in the 2024 polls, touted her achievements since her election in 2020.
According to her, one of these projects is a senior high school, which will be the first in the constituency.
“I have, within these four years, brought numerous developmental projects into this constituency. We didn’t have a secondary school. For the first time in the history of this constituency, we are commissioning our secondary school. This is progress, this is development,” she said on the Citi Breakfast Show on Tuesday, December 3, 2024 (between minutes 19:20 and 19:58).
Will the government’s construction of the STEM Academy in her constituency be the first senior high school in the area?
To promote truth in public discourse, DUBAWA decided to verify this claim just two days before the December 7 election.
Verification
The Ayawaso West Wuogon constituency is within the Ayawaso West Municipal Assembly.
In the Assembly’s ‘Programme Based Budget Estimates for 2024,’ published by the Ministry of Finance, the senior high school in the area was mentioned.
“There are thirteen (13) public Schools in the Municipality. The private sector has One Hundred and Fifty-Four Public Schools with One (1) Private Senior High School. Also, we are the home to two (2) private vocational schools, two (2) public schools, and three (3) private universities,” the document reads on page 8.
The report also indicated that no public senior high school existed within the Municipal Assembly.
“However, the Municipality has no Public Senior High School,” page 40 of the document reads.
To ascertain that the private senior high school indicated in the 2024 budget is not a recent creation, DUBAWA Ghana checked with the 2019 estimates.
In that document, the number of senior high schools in the area was quoted as five (5), all privately run.
“There are Six (6) Public and Fifty-Eight (58) Private Kindergarten, Six (6) Public and SeventyFive (75) Private Basic Schools, Seven (7) Public and Thirty (30) Private Junior High Schools, Five (5) Private Senior High Schools, One (1) Vocational School and Two (2) Public and Four(4) Private Universities in the Ayawaso West Municipality,” the programme based budget estimates for 2019 (page 3 and 4) reads.
This speaks to the history of the existence of senior high schools in the Ayawaso West Wuogon constituency.
The Accra STEM Academy On January 12, 2022, the President, Nana Akufo-Addo, cut the sod for the construction of a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) School at East Legon in the Ayawaso West Wuogon Constituency.
The facility is known as the STEM Academy.
In October of this year, the Vice-President, Dr Mahamadu Bawumia, in the company of other government officials, inspected the progress of the work at the site.
The project, upon completion, is expected to admit pupils from Kindergarten to Senior High School.
Conclusion
There is an existing Senior High School in the Ayawaso West Wuogon constituency, although privately run. It is, therefore, misleading for the lawmaker to suggest that there is no Senior High School in her constituency.
