The stand of the Director-General of the Ghana Education Service on cancelling the teacher licensure examination and prediction of a landslide victory for the ruling New Patriotic Party in the December Presidential elections are the trending stories in the Ghanaian press on Friday.
The Graphic reports that the Director-General of the Ghana Education Service (GES), Prof. Kwasi Opoku-Amankwa, has said that it will be suicidal to reverse the professionalism of teachers by cancelling the teacher licensure examination.
“If that happens, then we will still keep our teachers below international standards. But we have to make every effort to bring them at par with their counterparts elsewhere, and that is the best practice everywhere,” he said in an interview.
Prof. Opoku-Amankwa was speaking with the Daily Graphic yesterday during a visit to the Accra College of Education, which serves as one of the centres for the Ghana Teacher Licensure Examination, which started yesterday.
Licensure exam
In all, 31,167 newly trained teachers are writing the two-day examination in Literacy, Essential Professional Skills and Numeracy.
The examination, which was slated for September 24 and 25, 2020, had to be rescheduled for October 1 and 2, 2020 because of the change of the academic calendar of the colleges of education as a result of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.
The newspaper says that President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has predicted a landslide victory for the governing New Patriotic Party in the December Presidential elections.
He said his confidence stems from his superior record as President as compared to what he described as the “very, very, poor record” of his main opponent John Dramani Mahama.
In an interview with Kumasi-based Hello FM, President Akufo-Addo added that he was further buoyed by the reception he had received from Ghanaians on his travels across the country.
“I don’t believe that the 2008 example is what is going to happen (in 2020), we are going to win this election big time. Oh yeah, for sure, it’s obvious from our work and from the reception that people have been giving me across the country,” President Akufo-Addo said.
The Graphic also reports that Ghana has so far recorded a total of 11,550 cases of cybercrimes since launching its Cybercrime Incident Reporting Points of Contact (PoC) in October 2019.
This, according to the National Cybersecurity Advisor, Dr. Albert Antwi-Boasiako, has been achieved as a result of the enhancement of the work of the National Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) with that of the PoC.
The PoC was launched in October 2019 by the Minister for Communications, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful to facilitate the reporting of cybercrime and cybersecurity incidents by the public.
Speaking at the formal opening of the 2020 National Cyber Security Awareness Month and the launch of the Child Online Protection (COP) Portal in Accra on Thursday, October 1, 2020, Dr Antwi-Boasiako, said the Points of Contact are especially crucial as it will augment the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) Reporting Portal.
The Times reports that the Food and Drugs Authority (FDA) has granted authorisation for COA Mixture produced by the COA Herbal Centre to be marketed as a herbal medicine to replace COA FS, which was a food supplement, the Chief Executive of the Centre (CEO), Professor Samuel Ato Duncan, has announced.
He said the authorisation thus changes the status of the COA FS preparation from a food supplement to a herbal drug with the new name COA Mixture, a herbal medicine for general wellbeing, which has already been launched.
In April this year, the FDA asked the centre to withdraw the product, which was classified as a food supplement, from the market over claims of it being unsafe for consumption, citing contamination.
The CEO said following the recall of the COA FS from the market due to microbial contamination, the company received products worth GH¢1,680,000, which were destroyed with the help of the FDA.
He said this while inaugurating its new state-of-the-art factory at Wosorkrom in the Abura-Asebu-Kwamankese District of the Central Region.
The newspaper says that as the world marks International Day of Older Persons (IDOP), the Commission for Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) has advocated expedited action on the passage of the National Aging Bill (NAB).
The commission said eight years after the state declared its intention to formulate a law to beef up human rights, health and wellbeing of the aged, it was yet to finalise the bill and present to parliament for consideration.
Some stakeholders have described the delay in the passage of the bill into law as a development that has worsened the vulnerability of the aged ”, a statement issued by Joseph Whittal, the CHRAJ Commissioner in Accra yesterday, said.
Designated in 1990 by the United Nations, IDOP is commemorated on October 1 every year, to deliberate and increase efforts to protect the human rights of older persons across the world.
This year’s edition, marking 30 years of the commemoration of the day, has the theme; “Pandemic: Do they change how we address age and ageing?” and it focuses on making a case for the wellbeing of the aged to be upheld.
GIK/APA