The Nation Builder’s Corps (NABCo) trainees who are owed some 9 months of arrears recently served notice that they would picket at the Jubilee House in the coming days. The trainees say they would not leave until they receive bank alerts signalling receipt of the areas owed or the government pays them in cash.
This was communicated by the President of the Nabco Trainees Association of Ghana (NABTAG), Dennis Opoku Aseidu. He said this when he spoke on A1 Radio’s Day Break Upper East Show today, Tuesday, August 23, 2022.
“We are not going there with guns, neither are we going there with any offensive weapon. We are going there peacefully to do our peaceful picketing. We will go there even if they are supposed to kill us because we are even dying in our various homes.”
“We are not going to go back to the house and be telling the government to pay us our arrears. While the programme is still in existence, before September 1, we will demand what is ours. The government does not need enough time to come to our aid. The government has had 8 months to do what is expected.”
But speaking on the same platform yesterday, Wednesday, August 24, 2022, a member of the NPP’s Communication Team, Johnson Ayine, while empathizing with the predicament of the NABCo trainees asked them [the traineess] to exercise a little bit of restraint.
“I sympathise with them for their predicament … but I would plead with them to understand the situation at hand and also have some level of patience. Who would like to work for 10 months without pay?”
“But I think on the side of a government that wanted to have sympathy for them, and not pushing them away, said that they should stay. Otherwise, it was a 3-year contract and by 3 years, you would have to exit,” he said.
Mr. Ayine explained that without the ravaging effects of the COVID-19 pandemic along with the hassle of passing the 2022 Budget Statement, there would have been new recruitments for the scheme in February, by which time, the existing trainees would have transitioned on into permanent jobs.
“On humanitarian grounds, the government was thinking; why should we tell these people to go home? So they stayed. The stay is what has created this problem for us. If they had exited, by this time, we would not be going through this thing. So they themselves should understand that, on humanitarian grounds, the government had that feeling for them, but if the money is not there, what do we do?”
Source: A1radioonline.com|101.1MHz|Mark Kwasi Ahumah Smith|Ghana
