Education Minister Exposed “Big Time” In Scholarship Fraud -Scuttles in Confusion

Attempts by the Minister of Education to extricate himself from the raging Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFUND) fraud has opened a flood of revelations about how he used his privilege as a minister to secure mouth-watering study opportunities abroad.

For instance, Ras Mubarak, a parliamentarian has revealed that minister of education, Dr. Matthew Opoku-Prempeh had challenged the Minister for blowing US$300,000 from the accounts of the National Service Secretariat (NSS) to attend a one-week programme at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston recently as a Minister of Education.

“A big fat lie from the Minister of Education on his denial that he’s never received scholarship since he assumed office aa Minister and I challenge him,” Ras Mubarak dared NAPO in a post on his Facebook wall today.

“He was sponsored by the National Service Secretariat for a program at MIT Uni in Boston in his capacity as Minister for Education. He and some NSS staff spent $300,000 USD or 1.3 million cedis then, of taxpayers’ money for a one week program in the US. I know this for a fact because I had exposed him on the floor of Parliament.”  

The Dr. Opoku Prempeh and several other ministers, Parliamentarians and government appointees were recently exposed by the Auditor-General for ambushing scholarships meant for poor but brilliant students to be able to further their secondary and tertiary education in Ghana.

Between 2012 and 2018, these illegal beneficiaries composed of government appointees and politicians who have mostly earned their tertiary education certificates, got the GETFund to skim over GHC 2 million meant for poor students to study in Ghana.

According to the executive summary of the Auditor-General’s report on the auditing of scholarship administration by the GETFund, the fund bundled up this staggering amount and handed it over to the rich recipients to jet off for purported studies abroad.

Not long after the expose, the embattled education minister issued a statement claiming the allegation was false. “I have not received any form of sponsorship for any program or course of study from GETFund or scholarship secretariat since becoming a Minister,” he wrote on his Facebook wall in rebuttal.

However, in the very next paragraph of his rebuttal, Dr. Opoku-Prempeh who was recently lying about the clandestine attempt to infuse Homosexual and transgender (LGBT) into Ghanaian school curriculum admitted he had received a GETfund “award” to go study abroad.

“However, I have been a recipient of GETFund award in 2014 to participate in a 3-week certificate program at the Kennedy School of Govt, Harvard University,” he stated in a clarification that made nonsense of his earlier rebuttal.