Some scandals are absurd and beyond imagination. The one reported about the Youth Employment Agency (YEA) yesterday is one of such worrying moral challenges in our public service. Even more worrying is the fact that there are others elsewhere yet to be unearthed.
We are constrained to ask whether those managing the agency had any iota of patriotism or morality in them. Facilitating the payment of allowances to non-existent persons and turning round to collect the dividends is not only criminal but presents yet another layer of corruption and open thievery from the state coffers. This major feature of the past is a subject we should discuss as a nation lest it becomes endemic if it has not assumed that status already.
It can only be conjectured what would have befallen this country had the political status quo remained. There could have been an abrupt breakdown of state. With a seeming and consistent financial hemorrhaging of the state kitty, we could bet the personal amassment of wealth at the expense of the state was not despised by the President.
If he was not aware about what was happening and even benefitting from it, then he had lost control of the system the people of Ghana had entrusted him with.
We salute the Chief Executive Officer of the YEA whose vigilance and curiosity led to the discovery of the absurdities and thefts.
We urge other appointees heading state institutions to put their payrolls under the microscope for stories that could daze them. There could be similar YEA absurdities lurking and waiting to be discovered.
Putting the story in the public domain should not be the end of the story. Those behind the thievery should be identified, named, shamed and jailed. If it is criminal why shouldn’t they face the music?
Let him not rest on his oars in his bid to change the face of managing this important agency in a country where youth unemployment requires effective measures such as functioning YEA devoid of such moral maladies.
We are by this commentary asking that a probe be ordered into how the thievery was sustained and for how long. Those who facilitated it should tell the nation the story behind it all. This way we would be on our way to obviating a future recurrence.
We have said it before that ‘the business as usual’ module can only be discarded only when we decide as a people that enough is enough.
It is just unimaginable that an initiative intended to address unemployment is subjected to such financial recklessness by technocrats with the backing of politicians.
We should not expect the country to grow under such open thievery of the coffers. It is pitiable that at a time when we should be thinking about new ways of enhancing our production methods we are saddled with probing the ledger books of state institutions.
In a social media driven world today we should not expect this national shame to be restricted to the four walls of Ghana. It is all over the world in the boardrooms of institutions which have offered helping hands to our wobbling national budgets over the years. What a pity!