The eight female students of Chiana SHS should face additional disciplinary measures rather than dismissal, according to President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-request Addo’s to the Ghana Education Service.
This information was included in a press statement that Kwasi Kwarteng, the GES spokesperson, signed.
According to the announcement, the Minister of Education, Dr. Yaw Adutwum, has instructed the GES to evaluate the disciplinary action taken against disobedient students as a result of the President’s intervention.
Read also: SHS students expelled for calling Akufo-Addo derogatory names.
Eight female students at Chiana SHS in the Kassena Nankana West District of the Upper East Region were expelled by the Ghana Education Service (GES) for insulting the President.
The students were fired as a result of a widely shared video that surfaced in November of last year in which they were seen cursing President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and venting their unhappiness over the extreme hardships that the nation was experiencing.
The discharge of the affected students was announced in a letter dated November 29, 2022, written by the Director General of the GES, Dr. Eric Nkansah, and delivered to their guardians.
In the letter of dismissal, the GES criticized the affected students’ behavior for being inappropriate and inconsistent with the acceptable norms of behavior that are typically expected of all students in Ghana’s educational system.
The disciplinary action is the result of an investigation into the video that was started by the GES and the Chiana SHS administration after they apologized to the President on behalf of the involved pupils.
A request for the authorities to be merciful in dealing with the students made by Bright Appiah, Executive Director of Child Rights International, was not taken into account in the GES’s ruling.
“The state has an interest in resolving deviant behaviors when children display them. It is not the intention of the mechanism in place to rectify that behavior to create victims. He is quoted by starfm.com.gh as saying, “It is not the kind of system that should tarnish the image of the kids; it should be the kind of system that will reform them, then rehabilitate them so that they can see things from the normal perspective in terms of how the state expects kids to behave at the particular age and all that.
The Ghana Police Service seized and arrested Salamatu Mohammed, a 40-year-old mother of four, in November of that year for disparaging and wishing President Akufo-Addo dead.
The woman was detained after a popular TikTok video of her bemoaning the ongoing extreme hardship and the ensuing soaring prices of goods and services, in which she claimed to be a resident of Accra’s Ablekuma North Constituency.
