NABCO Is Best Labor Policy Initiative in 40 Years

Scarcely a week ago, a presumably pro-New Patriotic Party (NPP) group of Akufo-Addo detractors calling itself the United Party Group, or some such name, caustically accused the President of presiding over a bloated administration that also woefully lacked a comprehensive and clearly delineated job-creation policy. The group, predictably, did not find it worthwhile or significant to discuss the fact of whether any Fourth-Republican government had mapped out or created and successfully executed any such job-creation program. I was contemptuously amused because this so-called United Party Group clearly appeared to be hell-bent on railroading the Presidency of the man whom they are well known to most love to hate, even while disingenuously pretending to share the same ideological platform and goals with Ghana’s former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice.

Guess what? Now Nana Akufo-Addo has deftly and creatively put these inveterate internal detractors to shame. I did not bother to waste my scarce and precious time reading the entirety of whatever guff this faux-think tankers had to serve their obvious target audience. Yes, Nana Akufo-Addo has put these impudent internal detractors to shame with the historic unrolling of his Nation Builders’ Corps (NABCO) program (See “NABCO Will Be Sustained; It Has Come to Stay” CitiNewsRoom.com / Modernghana.com 10/18/18). In a gist, NABCO aims to transition recent college graduates from their mandatory one-year National Service into another year of paid hands-on professional apprenticeship that promises to smoothly ease the beneficiaries into permanent positions on the labor market. That NABCO is a government collaborative with the private sector is what singularly makes this program highly potentially sustainable, contrary to what the self-serving and visionless leaders of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) would have the rest of us believe.

You see, one cannot take the faux-socialist NDC leaders seriously because they have absolutely no track-record of either crafting or implementing any viable and/or meaningful and progressive social intervention program such as NABCO, which promises to transitionally employ some 100,000 recent college graduates. Then also, who has so soon forgotten the slavish abuse and exploitation of our college and university graduates under the tandem regimes of the Mills- and Mahama-led National Democratic Congress between 2009 and 2017? This is why it would be tantamount to an inexcusable waste of time to place any premium on the word of these double-salary drawing NDC robber-barons who so wistfully and cynically claim that the GHȻ 3 Billion policy initiative is not sustainable. Remember, these same pathologically self-interested scam-artists also said the same thing on the eve of former President John Agyekum-Kufuor’s landmark implementation of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), which by the end of his four-and-half-year tenure, former President John Dramani Mahama had callously, deliberately and effectively bankrupted and had to be resuscitated by President Akufo-Addo.

And then just this past year, the NDC’s Apostles of Doom swore Heaven and Hell that the currently operational fee-free Senior High School Policy Initiative, implemented by Nana Akufo-Addo, was at best “a pipe-dream.” Those are the exact words of Mr. Mahama. And so precisely what else does any progressive-minded eligible Ghanaian voter and citizen expect from these gravy-train marauders? But make no mistake, Dear Reader: within the context of the invariably dismal political track-record of the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress, NABCO, NHIS and, of course, the fee-free SHS Policy Initiative are not sustainable. Remember SADA, SUBAH and GUBAH? That is, if Ghanaians repeat the apocalyptic mistakes of Elections 2008 and 2012 by returning these Cash-and-Carry freeloaders to the Jubilee-Flagstaff House.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
October 25, 2018
E-mail: [email protected]