Former President John Dramani Mahama has painted a dire image of Ghana’s health and educational sectors under the President Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party government.

According to Mr Mahama, the National Health Insurance Scheme so far as health care delivery is concerned is on its knees.

Speaking to party delegates and supporters at Lekpe Todomey as part of his campaign to lead the NDC as flagbearer in the 2024 general elections, Mr Mahama said “Our country is in a mess, everything has gone backwards, national health insurance - if you go with your card, if you’re lucky you get paracetamol, most times you have to go and buy from the drug store yourself.”

Touching on education, he noted “Our educational system is in tatters, the children go for three weeks, four weeks and they have to come back home so that another group will come.

“They go to school, the food they serve them is so poor that, the parent, if you don’t give your child food to go, by the time he goes to school and comes back, he’s become so lean because he doesn’t get nutritious food.”

The former Ghanaian leader said one child told him that “they give them black tea in the morning, that’s all, and so, the money that their parents give them he uses it to buy bread so when they’re going to the dining hall, he cuts his own bread and goes with his bread to drink the black tea.”

Lamenting further on the state of high schools in the country, he told the gathering “Many of them don’t have dormitories, we were building dormitories in almost all the schools so that when the children come and they are many, everyone will get a place to stay. Once we left office, those dormitory blocks, classroom blocks all have come to a standstill because government has mortgaged the GETFUND and taken a loan against it to build STEM schools and, so, the already existing secondary schools that had projects going on all have come to a standstill.”

“We were building community day schools called E-Blocks, several of those E-Blocks were at an advance stage of completion and since we left, they’ve abandoned those E-Blocks, our children can’t go in to study so Ghanaians are calling us (NDC) back,” he added.