PrimaryBy Daniel Nii Okine
There is a point where structural neglect ceases to be a mere bureaucratic failure and becomes something far more insidious: a systemic assault on the dignity and safety of our children.If you were to take a walk through the compound of the Christ Faith Mission 2 Primary School, located within the Adenta Municipality, your immediate reaction would not be one of academic inspiration. It would be one of visceral shock. The compounding reality of this institution is simple, stark, and utterly indefensible: you would not even rear pigs in this building, yet we expect the future leaders of Ghana to sit within its crumbling walls and learn.This is not a school. It is an active hazard, a monument to a broken maintenance culture, and a ticking time bomb waiting for a tragedy to happen.
Thirteen Years of Rot and Empty Promises
For thirteen long years, this structure has been left to decay. Thirteen years of shifting blame, of letters written by desperate headmasters that have undoubtedly been filed away to gather dust in comfortable, air-conditioned ministry offices. It clearly shows that absolutely no maintenance has been done on this building for over a decade. Every single crack in the wall, every exposed piece of rusted metal, and every sagging beam points to a damning truth: those in authority have sat aloof and watched this happen.
We are a nation obsessed with reactive damage control. We fold our arms, ignore the warning signs, and wait for the building to collapse. We wait for children to die before we take knee-jerk actions and offer empty condolences. But now that the spotlight is directly on Christ Faith Mission 2, the excuses must end. This is the time to act. Not next term, not after the next budget cycle—now.
A Dysfunctional Environment for Education
To understand the sheer magnitude of this failure, one only needs to look at the daily indignities suffered by the students and teachers alike:
- The Sanitation Crisis: The washrooms are a disaster. Currently, because of the unresolvable state of the infrastructure, both male and female students are forced to share the female washroom.
- The Destruction of Learning Materials: In the classrooms, the cupboards are completely useless. When the rains fall, water drips directly into them, destroying the children’s books and teaching resources.
- The Morning Routine of Despair: During the rainy season, the first order of business for these young learners isn’t reading or writing. It is grabbing buckets to sweep floods of water out of their classrooms, before settling down to learn in a damp, freezing, and hazardous environment.
How does anything enter a child’s head under conditions like these? How can we speak of quality education and global competitiveness when our pupils are shivering in wet classrooms, breathing in mold, and looking up at a ceiling that could cave in at any moment? The library is in complete shambles. The roof is falling, the structural metals are completely exposed, and fear has become the baseline emotion for everyone involved. The teachers are scared, the authorities are scared, the children are scared, and the parents live in constant terror that their wards will not return home safe.
Where is the Accountability?
We are told this is a GetFund project, and that only GetFund can fix it. Well, GetFund is still alive. GetFund still exists. So why is GetFund not fixing this?
To the Municipal Chief Executive (MCE), Honorable Ella; to the Member of Parliament, Honorable Mohammed Adamu Ramadan; to the Minister for Education, Honorable Dr. Yaw Osei Adutwum, and your deputies—wake up. This is a serious issue within the Adenta Municipality that requires immediate intervention.
Let this serve as a strict warning: should anything happen to these children while learning is taking place, the state will not escape accountability. Parents have every right to sue the government for gross negligence when the evidence of danger has been laid bare for years.
We must refuse to be a society that only cares when it is time to mourn. The Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Education, and the local assembly must intervene at Christ Faith Mission 2 Primary immediately. Our children deserve an education, but above all, they deserve to live.
