Employ more youth into security services - TUC to government

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) has called on the Government to employ more young people into the security services to address the country’s unemployment situation.

It said same should be done in the health and education sectors.

Dr Yaw Baah, Secretary General of TUC, in a media interaction on the sidelines of a review of the 2022 budget in Accra, said terrorism attacks in neighbouring countries, including Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Mali, were indications that Ghana was not immune to such attacks and that the surest way to prevent them was to engage the youth gainfully.

Thousands of Ghanaian youth trooped to various recruitment centres across the country during this year’s selection process into the security services.

“Currently, there’s one police officer to one thousand Ghanaians, and it’s not good enough…No individual or groups of people are allowed to put the security in their hands. It is for the government and that is very basic thing every Government must do... to protect my property and to protect my people and to protect my motherland,” he said.

Dr Baah said the private sector was unable to employ the numbers now due to the impact of COVID-19 and urged the Government to find jobs for the youth while cushioning the private sector to recover and continue to create more opportunities and employ many people.

He also said there was the need for the Government to stop the leakage in the tax system, saying, “if we manage to plug the holes in our tax system, Ghana will get the money to employ more.”

Mr Ken Ofori-Atta, the Finance Minister, underscored the need for the citizenry to support the Government by paying taxes for more jobs to be created.

He said technology presented opportunity for the country to raise more revenue, which required that people paid taxes for electronic transactions, including mobile money payments, bank transfers, merchant payments and inward remittances to engender national economic reconstruction.