The Executive Director for policy think tank Institute for Liberty and Policy Innovation (ILAPI), Mr. Peter Bismark has stated that the Nation Builders’ Corps policy (NABCO) was a vote-buying employment scheme meant to deceive the beneficiaries into voting for the New Patriotic Party (NPP).
Speaking on the Class Morning Show on Wednesday, 3 November 2021, Mr Bismark told show host Kofi Oppong Asamoah that “you know, NABCO is not employment, let’s put it that way, it is not an employment program, it is a training program mainly for vote-buying so I call it a vote-buying employment scheme.”
He further indicated that the NABCO policy was a strain on the budget of the government, and beyond the budget, it had no policy paper or blueprint.
“There was no document or blueprint on NABCO. They had no document on the exit plan. There was nothing like that,” he added.
In his view, NABCO would have succeeded if the government had taken time and managed the policy as a socio-economic policy.
The NABCO initiative which was launched by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, on Tuesday, 1st May, 2018 came to end in October 2021.
President Akufo-Addo while launching the programme was confident that by the time NABCO trainees exit the scheme “the requisite work readiness skills and experience, often deemed a barrier to their employment as fresh graduates, would have been resolved.”
One hundred thousand youth were employed in seven priority areas termed modules. The modules were – Educate Ghana; Heal Ghana; Feed Ghana; Revenue Ghana; Digitise Ghana; Enterprise Ghana; and Civic Ghana.
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