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IMANI explains why NABCO will affect Ghana’s economy negatively

By Clement Edward Kumsah
NABCO will affect Ghana’s economy - Kofi Bentil
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The Vice President of Policy think tank IMANI Africa, Kofi Bentil says the newly introduced Nation Builders Corps – NABCO will immensely affect Ghana economy negatively.

The Nation Builders Corps - NABCO is a government initiative aimed at addressing graduate unemployment in Ghana.

The focus of the Nation Builders Corps - NABCO will be solving public service delivery in health, education, agriculture, technology, governance and drive revenue mobilization and collection.

Under the Nation Builders Corps - NABCO graduates will be trained, equipped with the necessary work tools and deployed around the country to engage in the following programmes: Heal Ghana, Feed Ghana, Enterprise Ghana, Educate Ghana, Revenue Ghana, Digitise Ghana and Civic Ghana and all trainees will be paid a monthly stipend of 700 Ghana cedis.

However, Speaking on Joy FM’s news analysis programme News File on May 5, 2018, Kofi Bentil vehemently opposed the notion that NABCO will solve the huge unemployment problem that has bedeviled Ghana.

“The first problem is inflation, you’ll destabilize your microeconomic stability when you pump so much money behind unproductive activities, I worry about that. And then you have the risk…look at what happened to the GYEEDAs, the YEAs, you have so much money going into a certain place, things are not very well defined and people are supposed to be trained. This is not new, you could have just taken this and slammed it straight into the YEA.

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“Again, let’s be clear, this is a purely political programme. There’s no economics to it, there’s no social aspect to it that’s to say we’re doing something as the people in power today to make sure that we’re seen to be alleviating the plight of our youth who face unemployment. But let’s be clear, every effort aimed at attacking youth unemployment is extremely important. To that extent, therefore, this is important.”

Also speaking on the same programme, Tamale Central Lawmaker, Inusah Fuseini articulated that the Nation Builders Corps – NABCO is nothing but an inefficient allocation of scarce social resources.
According to the Lawmaker, the President should rather concentrate its efforts at creating opportunities for the private sector to expand so as to create the necessary jobs.

“I have a fundamental problem with and difficulty in understanding the conceptual basis for this program. I think it is simply part of the inefficiencies of government."

“Government is clearly allocating our resources poorly and thereby taking on board too much expenditure that might not result in any meaningful impact on the lives of the people. It might get diverted from its desire to create that prosperity,”Inusah Fuseini noted

He added that the NABCO programme is not employment but a stop-gap measure and “a welfare scheme to create the impression that government is doing something about the unemployment situation”.

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