Kobena Mensah Woyome
The minority National Democratic Congress (NDC) in Parliament has accused the government of using the Youth Employment Agency (YEA) to witch-hunt its political opponents, who are legitimately employed to work with the agency.
The minority has also accused the current acting Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Justin Kodua Frimpong, of blatantly abusing his powers and spewing lies about employees legitimately employed under the agency.
At a press conference yesterday to react to a recent press conference held by the current acting CEO on detected ‘ghosts’ who had supposedly been employed in 2016 by the NDC administration and had cost the nation a whopping GH¢50 million, the minority, led by the spokesperson on Youth and Sports, Kobena Mensah Woyome, challenged the new CEO to publish names of all the purported ‘ghost’ workers, their Ezwich numbers, the YEA numbers, their various modules, the districts and the regions in which they work for the whole nation to verify.
According to the minority, the claim by the acting CEO could not be true because there is complete digital audit trail of all monies from the Consolidated Fund Account at the Bank of Ghana (BoG) to the bank accounts of all the youth engaged under the various modules.
He added that the Agricultural Development Bank (adb) has the bank account details of every single recipient of government monies from YEA.
“We are challenging the current management to publish the said audit report of the Internal Audit Agency it keeps referring to, together with the written responses of staff who were cited or implicated in the said report,” the minority declared.
Mr. Woyome questioned how management could withhold allowances for five months and expect all affected persons to be at post every day of the week.
The minority also explained that by their investigations, 2,999 beneficiaries were not at post at the time of the audit and not the over 16,000 quoted by Mr Kodua Frimpong at his press conference.
The NDC said since Mr. Kodua Frimpong took over as acting CEO in February, he had sacked all the 10 regional directors employed during the era of the party from their posts and replaced them with regional youth organisers of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP).
The minority further indicated that apart from the sacking of the 10 regional directors, the acting CEO during his press conference also gave strong indication that the current administration intended to transfer huge numbers of staff en bloc across the region.
“The current management has taken another intriguing action that seeks to transfer huge numbers of staff en bloc across the regions. We are not happy about these transfers because recent events have given us the cause to believe that these transfers are designed to remove affected staff from their offices and quickly replace them with friends, family and political apparatchiks of the new management, as it happened in the unfortunate cases of the regional directors,” Mr Woyome said, adding that for an agency with a mandate to employ the youth, these movements will set the agency back six months in lost time and productivity because it is an agency that has recruited, trained, employed and deployed 62,000 Ghanaian youth in 2016.
By Thomas Fosu Jnr