An aspiring General Secretary of the largest opposition party in Ghana, the National Democratic Congress, has clarified the circumstances that surrounded one of the government initiatives under the erstwhile John Dramani Maham administration.

Speaking in an interview on GhanaWeb TV’s Election Desk with Edward Smith Anamale, Elvis Afriyie Ankrah explained that contrary to the narrative, the NDC government rather came in to restructure the operations of the Ghana Youth Employment and Entrepreneurial Agency (GYEEDA).

He explained that upon their attainment of power, the NDC came to the realization that there was a lot of wrong with the institution, a situation that it immediately went to work on remedying.

He described as an ‘irony,’ the fact that people rather blame the John Mahama administration for the rot that happened under the GYEEDA program.

“The president gave me two mandates: qualify us for the World Cup and also restructure the youth front, and that included the National Youth Employment Program (NYEP). Now, the story that has not been told is that it is our government, under the direction of President Mahama, led by me, that streamlined and restructured the GYEEDA program.

“So, it’s an irony when people rather turn to actually lambast the NDC government for GYEEDA. So, we had the NYEP, and when we took office, we found so many issues with the NYEP, starting from when it was established. The problem was the way it was established, the structures and systems that were in place.

“There was no clear-cut mode of financing so the financing was haphazard; when bills accumulated, you’d have to go to the finance ministry and go and lobby and then get paid. We introduced a tax system; money from a source that would be coming regularly. Ways in which contracts were awarded. It was a situation where the service providers would rather bring in the contract; we changed that. We said service providers can no longer bring in contracts. The institution itself would sit down and then source for contracts and then no more sole sourcing,” he said.

Elvis Afriyie Ankrah, who was by then the Minister of Youth and Sports, explained that it was rather their efforts that streamlined the institution.



He added that it unfortunately, the bad outcomes from the unstructured administration before he took over was what many people heard about, so much that they exaggerated a lot of things.

“So, we actually restructured it, but by then, the issues were already there, but the focus was on those issues and of course, there were exaggerations; things like guinea fowls flying. There was nothing like that; absolutely nothing like that. Those were some of the exaggerations that occurred,” he explained.

Elvis Afriyie Ankrah speaks about even more things in the interview below:





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