New Year School and matters arising

Another New Year School and Conference has just ended and as usual, it came with a communique, proffering great recommendations and suggestions.

This routine has gone on for 70 years with this year being the 71st.

Every year, the New Year School sets an agenda for a national policy discourse, where various experts in policy formulation and planning, policy implementation, together with those in academia, serve as resource persons.

Over the years, crucial themes and sub-themes of national importance have been discussed with some of the recommendations implemented towards overall national development.

Surely, what started as an opportunity for people from all walks of life to meet during weekends at various centres to listen to various presentations from experts and also contribute to such issues has metamorphosed into a major platform known as the New Year School and Conference where crucial topics on national issues are discussed.

Topics of national interest in areas such as the stock exchange, reforms in education, security, health, energy, minerals, sanitation, environment, finance, democracy, digitisation etc. had been discussed at the various annual New Year schools.

This year, the focus was on “Attaining Ghana Beyond Aid, prospects and challenges”, a topic that holds so much for Ghana and the future.

The school has grown to become an avenue where participants from varied professional backgrounds bring their expertise to bear on national discourse towards the overall development of Mother Ghana.

It has also attracted high-profile personalities, politicians and technocrats who share opinions, experiences and offer suggestions to improve the school and also find a level ground on various national issues.

Indeed, the New Year School, which remains a platform for non-political, non-religious, non-ethnic and non-academic discourse, is the only programme that defies coup d’etats or a long closure of the university.

The Daily Graphic wishes to commend the organisers of the school, the School of Continuing and Distance Education, which took over from the Department of Adult Education and raised the bar to such great heights.

While commending the organisers, the Daily Graphic thinks that the school, which had run for over 70 years should be grounded enough to secure its own funding and not to continue to lament the withdrawal of subvention by the central government.

It is important that the organisers put together evidence of suggestions and recommendations at the school over the years that had been implemented to the benefit of the nation as a whole.

Such evidence-based paper can attract support from the corporate body and even some of the state institutions because that will be among their contribution towards such a worthy cause.

It is also important that organisers of the school pay particular attention to its relationship with the media, particularly journalists assigned to sit through and file stories.

The absence of a media room for journalists to sit in to file their stories and also the absence of a WiFi are indeed a blot and a minus to the organisers, who really need the media as partners to prosecute their agenda.

The Daily Graphic thinks it is unacceptable for journalists covering such a high-profile programme to always sit under trees to file their stories.

The New Year School and Conference is a laudable flagship programme of the university that must forge partnership and not suffer because of funding.