In a candid and explosive interview that has ignited fresh outrage across Ghana and its diaspora, Sabah Zita Benson, Ghana’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, laid bare what she describes as systemic “recklessness” in the administration of government scholarships under the previous administration. Seated in her office at the Ghana High Commission in London, surrounded by national flags and official documents, Benson detailed how taxpayer funds were used not only to sponsor individual students but to bankroll their spouses, children, visas, airfares, and living allowances practices she says contributed directly to a multi-million-pound crisis that has left hundreds of Ghanaian scholars in financial distress.
The video of her remarks, widely circulated on X (formerly Twitter) and amplified by commentators such as Hubert Tieku Esq (@KwesiHubert), has struck a raw nerve. One widely shared post framed a specific case as “not just corrupt but pure cruelty,” highlighting expenditure on a scholarship awardee’s family that included significant sums for travel and monthly support. The revelations touch on deeper issues of governance, prioritization of public resources, and the human cost borne by ordinary Ghanaian students studying abroad.
Benson pointed to official documents from the Ghana Scholarship Secretariat (now the Ghana Scholarships Authority) concerning a female beneficiary awarded a scholarship for a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) programme at Cranfield University in the UK. The award covered the period from June 2021 to June 2024.
According to the records she referenced:
Tuition fees amounted to nearly £19,000.
Living allowances exceeded £8,000 each for the student’s husband and their three children.
The government paid more than GH¢90,000 to cover visas, airfare, yellow cards (TB screening), and related travel costs for the family.
Benson emphasized that this was far from an isolated incident. “The document below is just one example. We have hundreds of such cases,” she stated. In related comments circulating alongside the footage, she expressed visceral dismay: the state was paying airfare and monthly stipends for entire families including spouses and children simply because one person was pursuing a degree (in some instances, programmes such as an MBA). “I cringed reading these documents,” she remarked about the scale of what she called the “rot” under the former registrar.
She argued forcefully that the substantial sums diverted to dependents could have been redirected to settle outstanding tuition fees and living stipends owed to actual scholarship students in the UK. Those arrears, she noted, accumulated to over £37 million between 2020 and 2025.
These disclosures build on earlier revelations. In 2025, the then-incoming Registrar of the Scholarship Secretariat, Alex Kwaku Asafo-Agyei, publicly confirmed similar practices under his predecessor. One documented example involved a 2022 award for an LLM in Law at Brunel University that included tuition, a substantial living allowance for the principal beneficiary, and an additional annual living allowance of around £8,160 for the spouse—alongside coverage for family travel.
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| Dr. Kingsley Agyemang |
Benson has consistently attributed the problems to the tenure of former Registrar Dr. Kingsley Agyemang during the Nana Akufo-Addo (NPP) administration. She has claimed the current government inherited a massive debt burden, with figures for UK-related obligations cited in the range of £32–37 million. This inheritance, she argues, explains delays in payments that have left students facing eviction threats, visa complications, academic interruptions, and severe personal hardship. Students have staged protests at the High Commission in London, and some cohorts have escalated appeals as far as British authorities.
Additional concerns raised by Benson and others include allegations that some scholarship award letters were effectively “sold,” with individuals reportedly paying significant sums (in one cited case, around £12,000) in exchange for an official award letter that promised tuition coverage and stipends. She has also questioned awards that appear to fall outside the Secretariat’s core mandate, such as funding for a 16-year-old to attend a private secondary school in the UK at a cost exceeding £56,000.
While families of some beneficiaries enjoyed comprehensive state support, many ordinary scholarship students have endured prolonged periods without tuition payments or living stipends. Reports from UK-based Ghanaian scholars describe arrears stretching 15–40 months in some cases. Universities issued warnings about possible visa revocation over unpaid fees. PhD cohorts and others organized demonstrations, petitioned officials, and publicly described feelings of abandonment.
Benson has engaged directly with affected students, acknowledging the inherited mess while defending the need for stricter verification, bond enforcement, and reforms under the new Ghana Scholarships Authority Act. She has insisted that completed scholars who remain in the UK to work should not continue claiming stipends indefinitely and has supported measures requiring repayment in certain circumstances. At the same time, she has faced pushback from student groups over verification exercises, oath-taking requirements, and the pace of clearing arrears.
The contrast is stark: public resources stretched to fund dependents of select awardees while core beneficiaries struggled. Critics, including the original poster of the viral video, describe this as a profound injustice against Ghanaian taxpayers many of whom face economic pressures at home—and against the students the scholarships were ostensibly designed to support.
The controversy sits within Ghana’s polarized political landscape. The previous administration has faced accusations of over-awarding scholarships without adequate budgetary backing, while defenders have sometimes characterized the debts as longstanding systemic issues rather than the result of deliberate recklessness. The current Mahama administration has moved to restructure the scholarship system through legislation, emphasize transparency (including public databases of beneficiaries), and prioritize clearing backlogs. Investigations into past practices have been referenced, including probes into alleged sale of awards.
Benson, a lawyer, former minister (Information and Tourism), and diplomat with prior service as Ambassador to the Czech Republic and concurrent accreditation to several Central and Eastern European countries, assumed the High Commissioner role in 2025 as Ghana’s first woman in that post. She has positioned herself as a forthright voice on the crisis, using social media and interviews to release documents and challenge previous practices.
At its core, this episode raises fundamental questions about public resource allocation in a developing economy. Scholarships represent an investment in human capital training professionals who are expected to return and contribute to national development. When funds are extended to non-students (spouses and children) on a large scale, opportunity costs mount: fewer genuine scholars can be supported, arrears accumulate, and trust in the system erodes.
The practice also invites scrutiny of eligibility criteria, oversight mechanisms, and potential conflicts of interest or favoritism. While family support can be justified in limited humanitarian or strategic cases, the reported volume “hundreds of such cases” suggests a policy or administrative culture that treated dependents as routine beneficiaries rather than exceptions.
For Ghanaian taxpayers, the optics are particularly damaging. Many families make significant sacrifices to educate their children; seeing public funds cover comfortable family relocations abroad while other sponsored students face destitution fuels perceptions of elite capture and poor stewardship.
The new legislative framework governing the Ghana Scholarships Authority aims to introduce greater discipline, transparency, and accountability. Public databases of awards, clearer prioritization (need, national priority fields, merit), and stricter bond enforcement are steps in that direction. Clearing the inherited arrears remains an urgent operational priority to restore credibility with both students and host universities.
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