We are waiting for approval of our budget to pay NSS allowance – Secretariat

The National Service Secretariat has disclosed that Parliament is yet to approve its budget for the payment of national service personnel.

This is a reaction to the agitations of service personnel not receiving any allowance since the commencement of their mandatory service in November 2023.

The Acting Head of Corporate Affairs for the National Service Scheme, Ambrose Entsiwah Junior speaking on the issue in an interview said; “It depends on the money that we receive at any point in time. Let’s not forget that we have submitted our budget to parliament like every other institution for appropriation to be done. And so once those things have been completed and funds have been released into our account, which includes salaries and payment of allowances and all that, we will pay the service personnel”.

Ambrose Entsiwah Junior also asserted that there is a need “to ensure that the new metric app that has been introduced to weed out ‘unscrupulous people’ who might find their way into the system. All these things will take a little while to be sure that we have gotten exactly those who qualified to do national service and are at post working before we can do the payment of their allowances,” he said in an interview monitored by The Ghana Report on Citi FM.

Additionally, Ambrose Entsiwah Junior also attributed the situation to the reposting of personnel stating, “People are requesting for reposting and it is difficult to pay them now. If someone has requested reposting, under which category are you paying the person? Is it under-subvented, non-subvented, in a school, in a particular town or village, and all that? So usually, we want to complete all these processes before we make payment” he added.