Strategy Director at the IMANI Centre for Policy and Education, Selorm Branttie has described the government’s Nation Builders’ Corps (NABCo) as a stopgap measure which has run its course.

According to him, the NABCo was not supposed to be a permanent feature in Ghana’s employment landscape.

“It was just supposed to be a one-off programme which was supposed to help transition graduates; I think both SHS and University graduates into some form of employment where there was a possibility at the end that they would be absorbed into the pool of employment either in the government sector or the private sector,” he said.

Speaking on JoyNews’ PM Express, Tuesday, he explained that the problem with the initiative was the fact that most beneficiaries had misconstrued it as a sure means of securing a job in the government sector or the private sector.

“And for me it was very clear that that was not going to happen.  First of all, because this would involve a huge process relating to recruitment and etc. and also budgeting. And it was very clear from the onset that government did not have the kind of funds to recruit all these people full time or absorb them into an already bloated civil and public service structure. That itself requires some kind of efficiency,” he said.

He added that “If you look at it, in some areas they were productive and in other areas they weren’t productive enough. But then we’re looking at an already bloated government employment scenario where in a lot of offices, there are so many redundancies that already need to be stripped or streamlined.

“And now this burden of the NABCO people coming in and taken full time into this situation will only cause chaos at the end of the day and a lot of unproductive people will still be under the government employ for whose value addition is very questionable in terms of what they add to the existing system,” he said.

According to him, employing the majority of the NABCo personnel into the government sector would have been impractical especially now that government was rapidly going digital.

“We are looking at situations where certain processes are being automated and therefore the human intervention is not even required at all. And so these things that happen have culminated into a situation where NABCO beneficiaries even after their dispensation has run out, feel entitled that they should be able to be absorbed into the government stream or the government labour pool,” he said.

But unfortunately, that shouldn’t be the case, Mr Branttie insisted.