UK/Ireland High Commissioner Sarbah Zita Benson has raised concerns over what she described as alleged abuses at the Ghana Scholarship Secretariat during the previous New Patriotic Party (NPP) administration.
In a video shared on Threads on August 12, 2026, Zita Benson said some scholarship beneficiaries who travelled to the United Kingdom for further studies were allegedly allowed to take along their spouses and children, with the accompanying family members receiving financial and other benefits from the scheme.
She said she was alarmed by documents she came across after assuming office, which she claimed contained details of the arrangements and pointed to what she described as serious irregularities under the former Registrar of the Ghana Scholarship Secretariat.
According to her, some scholarship recipients were sponsored for their studies while their spouses and children were also supported to join them in the UK.
“All these are scholarship documents that I received from the Ghana Scholarship [Secretariat]. I cringed reading these documents. The rot that happened under the former Registrar. This particular one is one woman. I don’t want to mention names. I’ll say, Princess. She gets a scholarship and goes with her three children.
“The children are paid to come and stay with their mother to study, and her spouse, her husband. And so, this one, for instance, has three children. She is enrolled in a master’s degree programme,” she said.
Zita Benson further alleged that the accompanying family members received medical coverage and other forms of support, with the overall cost for one family reportedly reaching about £90,000.
She also claimed that each accompanying child, as well as the spouse in some cases, received about £8,160 in financial support.
“She gets paid for the master’s programme with stipends. Her husband gets paid to come and support his wife in studying,” she said.
“Together with their three children, that’s another child. I’ll tell you, they pay for their welfare. So for the four, their visas, yellow card, yellow fever card, ticket, comes to about £90,000. And every month, the three children, their husband, everybody, not all of them each, gets £8,160 to support the mother to study,” she added.
The High Commissioner called on the National Investigation Bureau (NIB) to investigate the allegations and take action against anyone found to have benefited improperly from public scholarship funds.
She also called for any money found to have been wrongly taken from the scheme to be recovered.
“That is why NIB must move fast, make arrests, and make people pay for this. People must be funded. If you get a scholarship and you think that you are a wife and you are not ready to move away from your husband or your children, then they stay in Ghana and study,” she said.
Her comments have drawn attention to the management of public scholarship resources and the need to establish whether the practices described in the documents complied with the rules governing the scholarship programme.
