Prime News Ghana

Osafo-Maafo explains how NPP will pay trainee allowances

By Jeffrey Owusu-Mensah
Senior Minister-designate, Yaw Osafo Maafo
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Senior minister-designate and former Minister of Finance, Yaw Osafo Maafo has explained how the government of President Nana Akufo-Addo fulfil their promise of paying the allowances of Nursing and Teacher trainees.

According to him, the government was going to take a relook at the country's debt payment and engineer the fiscal space to be able to pay the allowances and make policies like the $1 million for every constituency feasible.

The President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo while campaigning in the 2016 elections promised to restore the allowances which had been scraped by the then ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) government.

The NDC had described the allowances, which had originally been instituted to attract more students into the training schools,  as unnecessary since the conditions for which they were instituted were not present as of now and the schools had been upgraded to the level of tertiary institutions.

The NDC also maintained that the continuous payment of such allowances was putting unnecessary pressure on the national kitty and it was just prudent that it was stopped but the NPP disagreed promising to include the payments in their first budget which was going to be ready around March. 

During his vetting by the Appointments Committee of Parliament, Mr Osafo-Maafo suggested that these allowances were not going to put pressure on the economy because when put together, they constituted just about 0.1% of the country's GDP and the Akufo-Addo government was going to pay them as has been promised.

He explained to the committee that, "the cost of servicing interests on debt equals to 7 percent of GDP. The cost of paying the Nursing and Teacher training allowance equals to 0.1 percent of GDP. Therefore if you negotiate the debt payment down to even 6%, you have a 1% space and just 10% of that 1% space will be enough to pay these allowances".

"So its just insignificant in terms of our GDP. Therefore we need to check our debt profile", he added.