Unpatriotism, bane of public institutions — Ashigbey
The Managing Director of the Graphic Communications Group Limited (GCGL), Mr Kenneth Ashigbey, has bemoaned the lack of patriotism among some Ghanaians, especially the youth.
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He attributed the challenges faced by public institutions and companies, mainly to unpatriotism at the workplace.
“Our dear nation is running critically low on patriotism and selflessness. Parochial interests and naive desires have conspired to erode our once communal spirits and self-help enthusiasm, so much so that we have only a few individuals and institutions to look up the for inspiration,” he said.
Mr Ashigbey was speaking at the 2014 Ghana National Service Scheme Conference in Accra last Thursday.
The conference was held on the theme: “Building entrepreneurial and employable youth for national development; the role of the Ghana National Service Scheme and stakeholders.”
It brought together service people from across the country together with stakeholders and some representatives from academia to discuss the way forward as far as employment was concerned for service people after their service.
Employability of service people
Speaking on how a national service person could be employed right after service, Mr Ashigbey said attitude was a major factor, and added that “your employability is dependent on your attitude to work.”
Apart from registration and orientation programmes ahead of deployment, service week celebrations and in-service engagements, he noted that the secretariat had little contact with service people and called for the situation to be changed.
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Skills
The Chief Executive Officer and Principal Consultant of the Gamey and Gamey Group, a labour consultancy firm, Mr Austin Gamey said, among other things, that the employer employs people with a level of skills to cause changes and a turnaround for the company.
The other skills which were mandatory of every employee, he said, were honesty, ambitiousness, commitment, self management, resilience, respect, among others.
Recommendations
On the way forward, the Vice Chancellor of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Prof Otto Ellis, among others, proposed that all students, irrespective of their programmes of study, should take compulsory courses in micro-businesses, as well as endeavour to come up with innovative business ideas to integrate into the business world.
In a speech read on his behalf, Prof Ellis called on the National Accreditation Board and other state agencies to ensure that all new programmes introduced by the training institutions had written confirmation from employers about the possibility of job openings for graduates after school, to avoid the mismatch of programmes read and the applicability on the job market.