We haven’t been paid for over six months – NABCo trainees demonstrate

Some disgruntled personnel of the Nation Builders Corps (NABCo) hit the streets of Accra today, Thursday, 17 February 2022, over the non-payment of monthly stipends owed them.

The protestors claimed the government had not paid them for over six months, and promises of upgrading their contract to permanent status were yet to be fulfilled.

Scores of the NABCo trainees massed up at the Obra spot and marched through the TUC intersection, towards the National Theatre, to the Ministries, and ended at the Independence Square.

The demonstrators were clad in red attire and headgear. They carried placards with inscriptions such as, ‘We are interested in permanent jobs, not 699.25 cedis’,’ Youth unemployment is a threat to national security’, ‘Job experience without livelihood is useless’, ‘We are very angry’.

They subsequently called on the government to pay all outstanding arrears from 2019 to date without any delays.

“Eleven months arrears of Heal Ghana Nurses and isolated trainees in other modules must be paid. The remaining three months arrears for all beneficiaries, which comprise November, December 2021, and January 2022, must be paid to foster a uniform payment stream of the scheme.

“We demand that the government officially communicates to us development(s) concerning the career pathway transition and, as a matter of fact, specify a timeline for the full implementation of the process.

“We are eagerly demanding from the current government to honour its pre-election promise of integrating beneficiaries into the permanent mainstream Works, resource selected Trainees into entrepreneurship and cushioning those who opted for further studies,” Secretary of the Beneficiaries of Nation Builders Corp, Frank Quansah, noted in a petition copied to President Nana Akufo-Addo.

In an earlier interview sometime in October 2019, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the programme, Dr Ibrahim Anyass said the issues of non-payment of allowances that have plagued the implementation of the Nations Builders Corps (NABCO) are just natural mechanical hitches.

Dr. Anyass explained that circumstances such as incomplete records on the part of some recruits genuinely hindered the payment process.

“One will be naive to think that you can have a new creation such as the Nation Builders Corps on such scale and extension and not have issues or challenges. For us, we just see this as natural to the implementation of the program. Some circumstances present themselves for people to relocate.

“These issues are natural because this is a human institution, and so people had to move, and they find that they were stuck with the data. Those were just mere implementation stage issues but as we speak most of those issues have been resolved,” he said.

Despite these setbacks, Dr Anyass assured that all allowances due to trainees are being paid, but Thursday’s protest by the trainees shows the problem still persist.

About NABCo

The Nation Builders Corps (NABCo) programme is a government initiative implemented to address the growing phenomenon of graduate unemployment.

The focus is to solve public service delivery in health, education, agriculture, technology, governance, and driving revenue mobilisation and collection.

The objectives of the programme are to:

• Provide temporary employment to unemployed graduates
• Improve skills and employability for the transition from program to permanent employment
• Improve public service delivery
• Improve on government revenue mobilisation
• To provide needed infrastructure to improve access to basic public services

Under the programme, graduates are expected to be trained, equipped with the necessary work tools, and deployed around the country to engage in the following programmes:

• Educate Ghana
• Heal Ghana
• Feed Ghana
• Revenue Ghana
• Digitise Ghana
• Civic Ghana
• Enterprise Ghana