There is a scene playing out across senior high school campuses in Ghana that, until very recently, would have been unthinkable.
On the day final-year students complete their WASSCE, some parents are driving brand-new cars onto school grounds, not to pick up their children, but to hand over the keys.
In front of assembled students, teachers, and other families, these vehicles are presented as gifts: a reward for surviving exams, a spectacle of success.
On the surface, it looks like parental love. Look harder, and what you are really watching is a performance of wealth, one with consequences that extend far beyond the lucky recipient standing open-mouthed in the car park.
This is not celebration. This is a social disease being smuggled into our schools in the guise of generosity, and it needs to be challenged head-on.
A Performance, Not a Gift
Let us be honest about what is actually happening in these moments. If the intention were purely to reward a child, the car would be waiting at home. It would be a private conversation, a family moment, something intimate and meaningful.
The deliberate choice to stage this gifting on school grounds with witnesses, with cameras, with social media posts already being drafted tells you everything about the real audience. The gift is not for the child; the gift is for the crowd.
This is conspicuous consumption transplanted into a space specifically designed for its opposite; a school, where children are meant to be equal, measured by effort and intellect rather than their family’s bank account.
When you drive a GH₵300,000 car onto a school compound and hand your teenager the keys, you are turning the campus into a stage and every other student and parent into an unwilling member of your audience.
What It Does to the Other Students
Consider the student who just sat the same exams. She studied for months, perhaps with a kerosene lantern when the electricity cut out. Her parents scraped together school fees, sometimes skipping meals to make it work.
She wrote her papers with the same nervous hope as her wealthier classmates. And then, on the last day, she stands in the same compound and watches another family publicly celebrate not her classmate’s grades but their money.
This is not a minor embarrassment. It communicates, in the most visceral and public way possible, that whatever she achieved through hard work and sacrifice is secondary to what another family can display through spending.
The psychological literature on social comparison is unambiguous: when young people are exposed to visible, dramatic displays of material inequality, it damages their self-esteem, increases anxiety, and correlates with poorer academic motivation.
Ghana’s schools are already contending with socioeconomic inequality. They do not need it being dramatised in the school car park.
What It Does to Other Parents
Perhaps the most insidious effect of this trend is what it does to the parents who cannot or will not participate. Because once the first car appears in a school compound and the images circulate on WhatsApp and Facebook, a new social expectation is born.
Other parents, watching those posts, now face a quiet but powerful pressure. What are they giving their child? Is a phone enough? A watch?
At what point does the modesty of their gift become, in the social imagination, a failure of parental love? What do their children say when their friends ask what they received?
This is how social norms work, particularly in communities where public standing matters. What begins as one family’s extravagance quickly becomes a benchmark against which other families are measured and found wanting.
Middle-income parents who cannot realistically afford to buy a car may find themselves stretching financially, going into debt, or facing resentment from their children. Poorer families simply absorb the shame silently.
The parents driving cars onto school compounds are not only affecting their own children. They are, whether they intend to or not, imposing a new and damaging standard on every other family in that school community.
What It Does to the Children Being Gifted
There is a temptation to see the recipient as simply lucky. But pause and consider what message this tradition actually sends to the young person receiving the car.
They are being taught, at one of the most formative moments of their young lives, that the completion of an educational milestone is primarily a commercial event, that what matters is not what they learned or who they became, but what they can now be given.
They are being taught that status is displayed publicly, that achievement exists to be photographed, and that their parents’ generosity is most meaningful when it is witnessed by others.
These are not values that serve anyone well in adult life. A young person who has internalised the idea that personal milestones are occasions for conspicuous spending is a young person being set up for a lifetime of financial decision-making driven by ego and social performance rather than wisdom. The car is not just a gift. It is a set of values wrapped in sheet metal.
What the GES Code of Conduct Already Says
Ghana’s schools are not without a framework for exactly this kind of situation. In January 2024, the Ghana Education Service issued a harmonised Code of Conduct for Students in the Pre-Tertiary Levels of Education replacing the patchwork of individual school rules with a national standard.
The Code mandates that students demonstrate courtesy and respect towards everyone, internalise good manners and observe standard values of life, and respect the rights of individuals. It also governs conduct and misconduct broadly, covering general behaviour and the maintenance of a conducive school environment.
The spirit of that Code, even where it does not address car-gifting explicitly, is unambiguous; school campuses are spaces of shared dignity and equal standing.
Public ceremonies that deliberately place one family’s wealth on display before the entire school community undermine precisely what that Code is designed to protect. There is nothing inclusive about a car ceremony on a school compound.
The Role of Parent-Teacher Associations (PTA)
Parent-Teacher Associations also have a role to play. As representatives of the wider school community, PTAs should not remain silent when practices emerge that undermine the values schools seek to instil.
They are uniquely positioned to encourage parents to celebrate their children’s achievements in ways that are inclusive, thoughtful and sensitive to the realities of all families.
A healthy school culture is not shaped by administrators alone; it requires parents themselves to set and uphold the standards they wish their children to learn from.
Schools Must Speak
What is most troubling about this trend is not that wealthy parents make indulgent choices that is a social constant. What is troubling is the silence of our heads of educational institutions.
Schools have codes of conduct, expectations about behaviour, and authority over what happens on their grounds.
Headteachers should have the backing of policy when they decline to host these spectacles. The GES should issue specific guidance to close the gap the current Code does not yet explicitly cover.
And parents, particularly those with the financial capacity to stage these displays should ask a harder question than “what can I give my child?’’.
They should ask, “what am I teaching my child?” and, “what am I doing to every other child in that car park?” The car can wait until you get home. The lesson it teaches, when unwrapped in public, is one Ghana’s schools can ill afford.
BY: JOSEPH OKAN-MENSAH KHARTEY ESQ; TRAINEE ASSOCIATE, AFRIMORE ADVISORS PRUC
