Refund fees to disqualified recruitment applicants - Minority urges govt
The Minority Caucus in Parliament has called for a bipartisan parliamentary probe into the centralised recruitment process for appropriate review.
“These applicants should not be forced to bear the financial consequences of what appears to be a poorly managed, exploitative recruitment process,” it said.
It, therefore, urged the government to refund the application fees of all disqualified applicants during the recruitment process.
Transparency
Addressing the media on behalf of the Minority Caucus in Parliament yesterday, the Ranking Member on the Defence and Interior Committee, Rev. John Ntim Fordjour, said the ongoing recruitment exercise into security services had raised serious questions about transparency, fairness and the integrity of government decision-making.
The MP for Assin South said having widely made recruitment into the security services a major National Democratic Congress (NDC) campaign promise in 2024, over 506,000 Ghanaian youth responded to the government’s call in 2025 and applied to join various security services under the Ministry for the Interior.
He said those young men and women, full of hope and patriotism, were made to believe they were being offered a genuine opportunity to serve their country and secure a dignified livelihood.
He, however, said the Interior Minister, at a press conference last Wednesday, indicated that only 5,000 applicants would be recruited from “this enormous pool of applicants”.
“This revelation has left hundreds of thousands of hopeful applicants devastated, disillusioned and feeling exploited,” he stressed.
Compromised exercise
Mr Fordjour said even more worrying was the decision to increase the recruitment age limit to 35 years, a policy shift that trapped even more unemployed youth to apply, he said.
That move, he said, significantly expanded the applicant pool and heightened expectations among thousands of desperate but qualified young people seeking employment.
“Let us also not forget the financial burden placed on applicants.
The government, through the Ministry of the Interior, collected GH¢220 application fees from each of the 506,000 applicants, resulting in the generation of total GH¢111,320,000 from the process,” he said.
Mr Fordjour added that the Internet-based aptitude test was saddled with a plethora of challenges orchestrated to frustrate applicants and result in mass disqualifications, without recourse to the competency of applicants who encountered palpable connectivity challenges and were timed out barely minutes into the test.
“Today, those same young people feel misled, exploited and abandoned,” he added.
“The Minority Caucus in Parliament cannot remain silent while hundreds of thousands of Ghanaian youths are being scammed and treated with such disregard.”
“The integrity of our national recruitment processes must never be compromised,” he stressed.
