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The Minister of Education, Dr. Yaw Osei Adutwum, says he will not respond to The Fourth Estate’s investigations on school placement now.
Today, JoyNews aired an exclusive interview with the minister today, but the host, Bernice Abu-Baidoo Lansah said the minister had indicated he would speak to the issues contained in the documentary at the right time.
“I am sure you want to hear about the famous school placement saga but the minister says he will speak in his own time,” the host said.
Prior to the JoyNews interview Dr. Adutwum had told the Ghana Television (GTV) Breakfast Show that his office would respond to the documentary after watching it.
“I hear and I am told there is a documentary, but I have not watched it. My staff is poring over the documentary and we will respond accordingly,” he said.
In that interview, the minister said he was going to team up with The Fourth Estate team to bring an end to the school placement fraud.
The Fourth Estate documentary revealed how a syndicate demanded and took money from undercover agents and changed the placement of students from lower to higher category senior high schools.
Our investigation revealed that Rachel, a member of the syndicate, could not have placed a student into Mfantsiman Girls without the approval of the Minister of Education or the Director-General of the Ghana Education Service, the only two individuals with passwords to Category A schools.
Eight persons are currently in the grips of the police in relation to The Fourth Estate documentary, but none of them is a staff of the Ministry of Education or the Ghana Education Service.
Meanwhile, the Education Committee of parliament has invited the Education Minister, Dr. Adutwum to appear before parliament following The Fourth Estate documentary aired on several media platforms across the country.
The ranking member on the Education Committee, Peter Nortsu Kortoe, told The Fourth Estate: “When the release of the video came out, we also watched and we have been speaking with people, so the chairman and I decided that we should invite the minister to the committee as quickly as possible to brief us on the development.”
He said the committee would also be interested in the report of an internal investigative committee at the Ministry of Education on corruption in the 2022 school placement. The committee, he said, would want “to find out what measures the minister is putting in place to forestall such occurrences in the coming placement.”
The Ministry of Education launched an investigation into the school placement fraud last year and presented its report to the sector minister, but the report has since not been published nor its recommendations implemented. The investigation was instigated by an alert from the National Security Ministry over allegations of corruption in the school placement.
Information available to The Fourth Estate, however, indicates that no action was taken on the report because it indicted some top officials of the ministry. For this reason, our sources say the report was not acted on.
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