You have one-month to settle our arrears—NABCo beneficiaries tell govt
Beneficiaries of the Nation Builders Corps (NABCo) have issued a one-month ultimatum to the government to settle their outstanding nine months’ arrears after they were excluded from the YouStart programme’s first disbursement phase.
On Friday, December 1, the government provided financial assistance to over 30,000 beneficiaries of the YouStart program aimed at promoting youth entrepreneurship and boosting economic growth in the country.
The Vice President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, also supported the beneficiaries with an amount of GHc100 million.
The NABCo graduates, in a press statement signed by the National Secretary, Frank Evans Quansah, lamented the decision by the government to exclude NABCo members from the YouStart programme.
“The government has a one-month ultimatum to pay us all the 9-month outstanding arrears. We do not want to have any business with the Nana Addo-Bawumia-led government again”.
“In November 2021, the coalition expressed our mistrust of the government’s renewed promise to “transition graduating participants on the NABCo programme to the YouStart program,” which was captured in paragraph 247, page 61, number Xi of the 2022 budget statement read by the finance minister in the same month the NABCO contract ended”.
“We even further stated that the YouStart promise to NABCO trainees was just to create a public smokescreen of good intention and blindfold the beneficiaries who were aggrieved by the NPP government’s fractured failure and forfeiture of the earlier promise to transition NABCO participants into the mainstream works”.
“Now our anticipation has become the reality as our ground sampling and inquiries prove that, so far, none of the NABCO beneficiaries who applied for the YouStart grants was called for the recent phase one of the disbursements of the grant. This YouStart programme has been another fiscal machinery to pacify aggrieved NPP party footsoldiers visa-vis resourcing the tall list of apparatchiks, family, and friends of NPP government appointees”.
“We have already lost trust in the Nana Addo/Bawumia-led government. All we need now is 9 months arrears fully settled as we don’t want to have any business to do with this government again”.
“Withal, we want to caution the NPP government to put an end to hailing and praising the non-functional NABCO scheme which didn’t accomplish the rationale for which it was created in its national budget every year as an achievement”.
The NABCO members added that they are going to intercept any partisan utterances and signage that will leverage the failed NABCO scheme in an attempt to win votes in the 2024 general elections.