Much is expected of NaBCo recruits

Employment generation has become a challenge across the globe, with both developed and developing countries caught in the web.

In fact, the world has moved from the days when vacancies were so secure that one would stay on the same job for years, at times till retirement.

In Ghana, the public sector has, over the years, been the major employer. But the sector has not been able to absorb the teeming youth and other unemployed persons, which calls for the private sector to complement the efforts of the public sector to provide employment avenues for the citizenry.

This has become more imperative, as current IMF conditionalities do not allow the government to engage more people in the public sector.

But the private sector has not developed to that level where it can provide the needed jobs alone.

The situation, therefore, calls for an innovative approach to deal with the huge numbers of our educated youth who are idling about because of lack of employment avenues.

For this reason, the Daily Graphic applauds the government for establishing the Nation Builders Corps (NaBCo) to initially engage 100,000 graduates from our tertiary institutions in various modules to keep them engaged for a period before they transit to the real world of work. We appreciate the President’s elation yesterday, and the excitement of the graduates, as 93,382 applicants who confirmed their acceptance were commissioned into the corps, which is one intervention that is to restore hope and dignity to the youth.

We are particularly pleased about the one-week intervening period of self-acquiring future employability and work-readiness skills programme after every four weeks of work that will hone the skills of the recruits.

The Daily Graphic congratulates the recruits on their graduation and urge them to use the period of engagement to work diligently, since, as pioneers of the programme, they have a singular responsibility to disabuse the minds of pessimists and cynics about the importance of the programme to the enhancement of the socioeconomic life of the country.

We have followed with enthusiasm the processes leading up to the graduation yesterday and commend the NaBCo Secretariat for the professional manner in which the initiative has been handled, from receipt of applications through interviewing to the training and engagement, and encourage other public organisations to learn from the activities.

It is only through this that we can get the best to work for the advancement of the country.

As the personnel start work in education, agriculture, revenue mobilisation, health, ICT, civic duties, industry and entrepreneurship, we remind them of the President’s advice to them to take advantage of the opportunity given them to be dutiful and productive to help develop the country with their knowledge and competences.

Our hope is that given the several weeks of rigorous training and capacity building programmes in their chosen schedules that they have gone through, the recruits will eschew the civil service way of doing things, such as lateness, absenteeism, malingering and extortion, albeit indirectly, and remind them that these are the practices that have drawn back our development.

Surely, NaBCo has come at the right time and we urge all citizens to contribute their quota to make it a success.