By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

The National Service Scheme (NSS) which was originally hatched and implemented by the junta of then-Col. Ignatius Kutu Acheampong’s National Redemption Council (NRC) in 1974, was essentially geared towards the massive mobilization of well-educated Ghanaian youth for the rapid development of our country at all spheres of national endeavor. Initially tailored for government-sponsored graduates of tertiary academic and professional institutions, the scheme worked fairly well, particularly in the area of marshalling supplementary instructional personnel for our secondary schools.

Since then, however, either out of spite or sheer administrative ineptitude on the part of successive governments or scheme operatives or both, the program has increasingly become a virtual boondoggle, with paid personnel often being idly engaged, thus creating avoidable wastage of scarce national economic resources, especially with the advent of the Rawlings-led Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) and the accidental inclusion of sixth-formers in an otherwise quite rational and fairly efficient scheme.

Oftentimes the problem has been far less a question of shiftlessness, or outright indolence, on the part of service personnel than the verifiable fact of the latter being almost invariably unsuitably and improperly placed. A striking example of administrative ineptitude as a major contributory factor to the abysmal failure of the NSS to register a desirable impact on Ghana’s development was evinced recently when the executive director of the scheme, Mr. Vincent Kuagbenu, indicated to the media, rather nauseatingly, as well as unprofessionally, that as a means of remedying a perceived high level of indiscipline among Ghanaian youth, the NSS would embark on “a month-long military training program for service personnel” (See “Service Personnel to be Posted into [sic] Farms” MyJoyOnline.com 10/21/09).

Perhaps somebody ought to inform Mr. Kuagbenu that 10 years of professional military experience did not prevent Mr. Jeremiah John Rawlings from upending and irreparably impairing Ghanaian political culture. And so, perhaps, it would be far more productive, and even expedient, for the NSS chieftain to inform the greater Ghanaian public of the scheme’s new-found agenda of training a critical mass of better-educated potential coup-plotters.

First of all, if Mr. Kuagbenu is, indeed, serious about boosting the country’s food-production capacity, or agriculture in general, then it appears to this writer that the most intelligent and effective method of pursuing such an agenda would be to provide adequate farming skills and the requisite implements for the personnel being so posted.

Secondly, the rather facile idea that almost anybody could creditably perform farm work, evidently because none of us could survive for any remarkable length of time without food, is far too primitive to warrant bold and self-righteous espousal by any key government operative.

Going by the preceding logic, it would readily appear as if Mr. Kuagbenu would be possessed of absolutely no reservations, whatsoever, in concurring with the imperative necessity for all Ghanaians to be promptly issued a license to practice medicine because, after all, we all take ill, or fall sick, from time to time.

In an interview that he granted Joy-Fm’s Mr. Stephen Anti, the NSS director is reported to have remarked as follows: “As I speak to you now[,] we are acquiring 20 hectares of land at Ejura and next year[,] we are going into crop production…. We shouldn’t be importing food when we have an army of youth. Who should go into food crop production?”

Our riposte here is simple: People with personal interest in farming who have been adequately trained for the purpose should go into farming! Needless to say, the very notion of rounding up a perceived “idle army of youth” for farm work, merely because the latter appear to be either unemployed or underemployed, reeks of rank administrative incompetence. Maybe Mr. Kuagbenu, himself, needs to be reassigned to work on a farm, since the man clearly seems to be convinced that he would be better off fully engaged in crop production as his singular contribution to Ghana’s economic and cultural development.

Short of the foregoing, the Atta-Mills government has absolutely no mandate to permit Mr. Kuagbenu to whimsically and indiscriminately turn Ghanaian youth into farm workers. The right of our youth to individually determine the means by which they believe they could best serve their nation is a fundamental human and democratic right that ought not to be disrespected and compromised so lightly.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is a Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI) and the author of 20 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com. ###