Teacher Calls For Arrest Of NPP Regional Secretary Over Ghc99, 000 School Feeding Fraud

David Forthgill Bentil, a teacher of the Anomabo Anglican Basic School in the Central Region, has petitioned the Director-General of the Police Criminal Investigations Department (CID) to arrest and investigate the Central Regional Secretary of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) over massive fraud that he is said to have perpetrated through the school feeding program.

In a 13th September letter, Mr. Bentil, who is also a native of Egyaa in the Central Region, says he has followed up on an investigation by an Accra based newspaper, The Hawk, which had uncovered Richard Takyi-Mensah reportedly using the names of two schools in the area to receive payments for school feeding contract even though the schools do not benefit from the program.

And Mr. Takyi-Mensah had reportedly connived with the headteachers of these schools to undertake the fraud.

 “My petition is grounded on a news item published by The Hawk newspaper on Tuesday, May 4, 2021, with a caption “Uncovering Sch. Feeding Contract Fraud Schemes (pt1) …The story had uncovered a culture of fraud in which 22 ghost- schools were receiving payments without cooking,” the angry whistleblower teacher revealed.

The newspaper alleged that the Central Regional Secretary of the NPP had received an amount of Gh¢99,120 as payment for supposedly cooking for 472 pupils of Ekurabadze M/A Basic School and Tayido M/A Basic School. 

The said amount, according to the newspaper, was paid to Mr. Takyi-Mensah through E-zwich account number 1677900-4. 

“…Upon my painstaking investigations, it is proven that both schools have never been on the Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP) since its inception. I spoke to some teachers and pupils of both schools,” Mr. Bentil’s petition said.

As part of his personal investigation, the teacher said several attempts he made at getting the Headteachers of both schools to comment on the matter proved futile, “as each of them rather in a strange manner, met me with aggression each time I tried to engage them on the matter. The conduct of the two Headteachers came to me as an indication of their likely complicity in the alleged fraud.”