I am gradually affirming to myself, after I have written extensively on this subject, that politics would soon plunge Ghana into war, especially if we do not stop ourselves from practicing it in its current form; our current partisan political practices are filthy, primitive, and, in a lot of cases, it is insanely unethical.
Recently the Public Relations Officer of the Ghana Education Service, one Reverend Jonathan Bettey blamed his transfer from Accra to Cape Coast, as being politically motivated. The self-acclaimed Reverend was reassigned in a routine transfer that affected non-teaching staff at the GES headquarters in Accra, and he is blaming his portion of the transfer as being politically motivated.
You should know exactly why the man blamed his transfer on politics, don’t you? He himself has been quoted as having said that the letter that gave him the promotion to the position he occupied was a gift from his boss, did you get that one? That his boss, as part of a birthday gift, or marriage anniversary gift, or for whatever reason, wrote a promotional letter for him as a gift; do you really get it?
Do you know the implications of a promotion being given as a gift? It goes with upward salary/allowances adjustments, possible government accommodation, vehicle entitlements, and retirement packages, all persisting and paid by you and I until his retirement, that is the gift an undeserving somebody gave to an undeserving somebody.
And as soon as the reverend made that reckless allegation on his transfer being politically motivated, the busy-bodied political communicators of both the NPP and the NDC jumped into the fray, one defending the statement, as the other kept busy denouncing it, leaving the man to still keep his reverend title to himself – you see why my ten year old nephew could easily become a DCE in Ghana?
My brother, the race in this country, towards defrauding our people, is too much. The Ghana Immigration Service is reported to have declared 500 vacancies. They invited applicants to apply to be considered for those 500 vacancies. An application form is sold for GH¢50, and over 84,000 young people applied, allowing the institution to bag over GH¢4.2million in profit, off the very unemployed persons on whose unemployment situation we rode to gain political power.
The Deputy Minority spokesperson on employment, Richard Quarshigah, has subsequently been quoted as having said that it is wrong for the Ghana Immigration Service to charge prospective recruits GH¢50 as application fees. According to him, Parliament approved money for the recruitment processes. Therefore it is fraud on the part of Ghana Immigration Service, or any other security agencies to charge applicants any such fees.
Meanwhile, the last time the Ghana Immigration Service conducted similar recruitment exercise was in 2016, during the NDC government, of which Richard Quarshigah was a member. The application fees, then, was GH¢100. So if a similar number of people applied, then the Ghana Immigration Service would have earned for itself over GH¢8.4million in profits, off the same poor youth Richard Quarshigah is now seeking to defend, do you get the contradiction?
Richard Quarshigah is again quoted as saying that his Parliamentary Committee “overlooked the ¢100.00 charged by the Immigration Service for its 2016 recruitment exercise because it was not an issue then. However, the GH¢50 charged for the same purpose in 2018 is an act of exploitation by the Service and must be interrogated”.
You see, sometimes I blame the universe for the imbalance in society. The ecosystem that puts human beings in charge of all other animals seems unfair to those creatures in the bush, especially when the skulls of some of us the human beings seem wrongly configured. I believe there should be some re-arrangement of how the food chain operates, so that animals should be capable of swallowing humans, at will, when such humans have fraudulent tendencies while playing victim. For instance, the python should be able to swallow Richard Quarshigah, effortlessly, as food, for seeing nothing wrong with a GH¢100 Immigration Service job application forms in 2016, while seeing everything wrong with the same forms sold for GH¢50 in 2018, you don’t think so?
And in fact, with the advent of wrong politics in this country, I am a firm believer that the re-arrangement of the ecosystem should not make humans superior. Let us put lions and fishes in charge of the world order, and let us eliminate wrong politicians, one lying tongue at a time, and let us satisfy ourselves that when we queue to vote, we are not voting for the same thieves over and over again in a recycled order, because the pythons who would have been ruling us, would have eaten all the mistaken mammals parading themselves on the streets of men, ruling those who should have ruled them.
In any case, who told you that any of the over 84,000 Ghana Immigration Service job applicants are going to make the mark into the 500 available openings? My brother, forgerrit. Those who would be selected are somewhere in their homes enjoying their peace of sleep. This charade of recruitment drives, that get several thousands of unemployed youth hazarding in the sun, must stop. Who in the Immigration Service has the time to screen all those 84,000 applicants?
The standard application form for such recruitment exercises is three pages long. The form captures your personal data, educational history, ethnic background, employment history, criminal records, family history, medical records, places of residence, as well as references for the applicants. Each of these information requires a set of evidences which requires careful vetting processes, as well as an interview process.
My several years of experience in being interviewed, as well as sitting on interview panels, shows that for such a security recruitment process, the minimum time one applicant needs to go through all the vetting and interviewing processes, at different stages, including the fitness processes, is three hours. A standard recruitment process of this nature requires that each candidate is attended to by a minimum of three recruitment persons. This means that for every set of recruitment personnel, they are only able to successfully attend to three applicants per day, on the average, for a nine working hours per day.
Assuming there are 20 (and this I am exaggerating in favor of the Immigration Service) different sets of recruitment desks, then that amounts to 20 recruitment desks by three applicants per day, bringing the total applicants attended to in a day to 60. This means 420 applicants shall be vetted in a week, even if the recruitment officers work seven days in a week. It also means that a total of 1680 applicants shall be attended to in a month, and subsequently 20,000 shall be vetted in an entire year. To be able to attend to all the 84,000 applicants, we will need a total of four years, for each and everyone of those applicants to be fairly considered, by which time the applicants recruited through the backdoor would have earned their fourth promotions.
You see? Should I continue? I will not, because it is fraud. And that is the most painful aspect of the whole exercise. You know you are not going to even look into their applications, yet you ask them to pay money to you, and you ask them to drench themselves in sweat in the sun, just to satisfy a process which is already fraud.
Do you, in your honest view, think Sammy Awuku, for instance, will sit down for unknown foot soldiers to wear the Immigration Service uniforms when the Delta and Invisible Forces are creating problems in the NPP?
And as is expected, all the NDC MPs who saw nothing wrong with the situation in 2016 are now seeing everything wrong with it now, while all those NPP MPs who saw something wrong with charging immigration job application fees in 2016, are now seeing nothing wrong with it today – nothing has changed, the same politicians occupying our seats for themselves.
Otherwise how did it happen that all of sudden the Minority in Parliament are accusing the Ghana Immigration Service of exploiting the situation of unemployed youth by selling more vouchers and making more money, when it was the same Minority, then in Majority, who saw nothing wrong when the same youth were in a worst situation? Obviously they are now fighting in the corner of the youth, with 2020 elections on their minds, right?
Don’t mind them. They are themselves fraudulent. They are just flip-flopping their colors in search of your votes. They would do the same, just as they did, while in government.
By James Kofi Annan