The Member of Parliament for Mpraeso, Seth K. Acheampong has called on government to put in place the necessary measures to empower job creation in Ghana. Making reference to the 2012 budget presented to Parliament last Thursday, Mr. Acheampong argued that “show the man how to fish so that when they grow up they will be able to fish for themselves. Don’t spoon-feed people, don’t just drop monies into people’s pockets with no proper foundation”. Speaking on Multi TV’s Minority Caucus program, the Mpraeso MP said the 2012 budget has no real policy which will ensure realistic job creation in the country. He argued that some recurring policies in the 2012 budget indicate that the NDC government is not committed to the development of Ghana since it has not been able to implement the recurring policies. “We believe government is not being serious enough, just more rhetoric, not necessarily that alone, for instance today we are hearing [about] affordable housing in this 2012 budget. Paragraph 494 is talking about affordable housing, when was affordable housing started?” he quizzed. “If government indeed meant to put [up] proper shelter for this country’s people we should not be talking about it in our 4th budget. What have we done in the three past budgets? There is no seriousness and that is our worry.” He asserted that even though Ghana’s economy is growing tremendously at a GDP rate of 13% he feared government might not be able to sustain such growth due to its expenditure pattern. He also raised concerns about the provisions made in portions of the 2012 budget indicating that “Ghana is allocating two hundred and sixty-two million plus for agric, out of that, over one hundred plus is [from] donor fund. (The main backbone of the economy, agric almost 50% is donor fund). If the donors do not bring the fund how do we engineer our agriculture … we need to be serious about the things that we talk about” he stressed. Mr. Acheampong also added that “government talks about interest rate, that we have dropped the bank lending rate to 18 or 15 percent there about [but in] the document lying before us on sovereign guarantee, government’s own borrowing – the government is borrowing from Fidelity bank at 23%, who are we lying to?” He thus advised government to pay attention to the informal sector, particularly the agricultural sector which contributes immensely to the development of Ghana’s economy and challenged government to dedicate enough resources to the spraying of cocoa in the agricultural sector. A policy advisor and NPP Parliamentary candidate for the Obuasi constituency, Kwaku Kwarteng who was also on the show, stated that the 2012 budget does not make adequate provisions for job creation in the country. “The strategies for job creation are woefully inadequate and I just hope in going forward government itself will recognize this and begin to do specific things that will create the jobs we are looking for” he noted. Mr. Kwarteng explained “you put out a budget, an economic policy statement that says job creation, people are definitely going to look hard to see where the jobs are and as I said, I would have loved to see [them]. Well we are realizing two billion from oil, we intend to invest that in say revamping our textile industry. To that end, government is going to partner the private sector to revive one, two, three industries, the amount allocated to it is so, so and so much. Then we can all monitor government to see what is going to happen there”. Although the policy advisor sees head with the policy on infrastructural development to boost private individuals’ potentials for job creation, he believes “what we don’t do is that, you cannot say you have gone for three billion from the Chinese, I am going to use that to put into infrastructural development and hope that the private sector will deliver jobs. When you go out and you see our youth looking for jobs to do, we would want to see specific direct interventions that will address our unemployment situation whiles you invest in infrastructure in the long term to create the job”. According to him, certain interventions in the 2012 budget directly go against job creation in the country. “You do not have a policy for MASLOC to improve small business operators and then you have in the budget counter strategies to that effect and I am referring to paragraph 179 where government increases taxations for artisans, ‘kayayees’, and for tomatoes sellers. It is in the budget that government intends to tax more informal sector operators” he argued. He criticized the NDC government for the delay in implementing the NHIS onetime premium policy saying “the NDC has some work to do on the onetime premium payment. We were promised thirteen billion Chinese loan, it hasn’t happened, STX, it hasn’t happened” he recounted. The minority is thus expecting government to live up to its promise of implementing the one time premium this time around.