National Service — A call to duty
All over the world, young people have made and continue to make sacrifices for their motherland; and in many cases lives have been lost in the name of national service to one’s country. The situation in Ghana is not different.
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Many young Ghanaians from socio-politico-cultural and religious backgrounds have performed one form of national service or another; and in almost every home in Ghana today, someone has done national service, or someone is doing national service, or someone will do national service sometime in the future. These are the sacred sacrifices young people of this country are expected to offer in the course of their lives after school.
Our forefathers struggled and toiled, some sacrificing their very lives, to secure for our generation and generations yet unborn, the most cherished political independence. Many economists and political analysts, however, think that the country is yet to achieve its economic independence.
There is therefore the need for selflessness, hard work, perseverance, loyalty and total commitment of our young people to the economic roadmap aimed at achieving our national developmental efforts.
The call on the Ghanaian youth to serve their country has never been lost on the minds of our leaders. The thought has always been that “the youth are the future leaders of the country”. Yes, that is true; and that is why there is the need to instill in the youth, the sense of patriotism and loyalty to the country.
The country’s first President, Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, had much confidence in the youth and thus anchored his political feats on the effective organisation of the youth who were ever ready to serve the country even at the peril of their lives.
Many of our political leaders in recent past have been products of the spirit of hard work, dedication, physical and mental discipline that were imbibed during the periods of their formal and informal training.
As a country, we have remained focused on the path of the youth in serving their country after school. The philosophy behind establishing the Ghana National Service Scheme was to call on the youth of Ghana to offer between one and two years of their time after tertiary education to work, especially in rural and deprived communities – to provide food, water, shelter and hope to the majority poor who lack education and several other basic social amenities.
We still remember those young university students who in 1973 agitated to be given opportunities to offer voluntary service to the country. This indeed was the genesis of national service in Ghana. We have not forgotten the role our young university graduates played in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s when many of the country’s trained teachers left for Nigeria and other countries for greener pastures.
Majority of those young graduates were then posted to the classrooms across the country to teach, and they graciously accepted postings. We cannot forget the critical role national service personnel played in the school mapping exercise when they collected vital data for the Educational Reforms Programme that the country embarked upon in September 1987.
We cannot also lose sight of the fact that national service personnel were called upon to work with the National Commission for Democracy during the first District Assembly Elections in Ghana in 1988.
The early years of national service saw the deployment of a little over 2,000 national service personnel. Today, we are deploying about 70,000 national service personnel. Forty-three years on, the county’s educated youth have contributed in diverse ways through national service towards our national development.
Today, we continue to call on the youth who are under lawful obligation to offer one year national service to the state. We ask our young people in national service to consider their contribution to national development as a “national sacrifice” they make to mother Ghana – a call to national duty.
The National Service Scheme (NSS) has currently begun processing prospective national service personnel for deployment to various sectors across the country for the 2016/2017 service year.
The scheme has extended invitation to user agencies, that is, metropolitan, municipal, and district assemblies; ministries, departments and agencies; educational institutions; hospitals; security agencies; private corporate organisations and all those interested in hosting service personnel in the 2016/2017 service year, to put in a formal request to the secretariat.
Very soon the head office of the NSS would be inundated with people from various parts of the country seeking specific favours with regard to postings. The scheme has over the years made it clear that it does not encourage, and will not honour requests for specific service personnel. It is expected that this would be respected by our user agencies and individuals with whom we have had very cordial working relationships over the years.
Our youth need to be encouraged to develop the spirit of nationalism and patriotism. Let our youth accept postings to serve in all parts of the country because we are all involved in building our motherland.