NABCO beneficiaries petition Special Prosecutors Office over arrears

The Aggrieved Nations Builders Corps (NaBCo) Trainees Association wants Special Prosecutor has petitioned the Office of Special Prosecutor to intervene in their attempts to retrieve their allowance.

According to the group, the government owes them nine months of allowance in arrears.

“The leadership of the aggrieved NaBCo Trainees Association (ANTA) petitions your good self as a Special Prosecutor, as a matter of urgency, to respond swiftly and appropriately to demands concerning our nine months unpaid stipends since November 2021 and other outstanding arrears since the year 2019,” the association stated in a petition to the Special Prosecutor, co-signed by its Convenor, David Peterson, and two other members, Dose Daniel Kojo and Rowlan Jemhi.

“We have in the past taken a number of steps to make headway regarding the payments of our arrears in question such as writing to NABCo Secretariat and organising several demonstrations, all to no avail,” the aggrieved trainees reminded the Special Prosecutor.

The group thus urged the SP to “as a matter of urgency to order the Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, to allocate funds for the payment” of their nine months’ stipends in arrears and “other outstanding arrears that have engulfed the NaBCO scheme since the year 2019 before Tuesday, 31 January 2023.”

This comes on the back of what the group describes as their failed attempts to get the government to pay the arrears.

“This is the umpteenth time we are reminding the government that beneficiaries of NaBCo are still owed eight (8) months of their stipends,” a statement signed by the National President NABTAG, Dennis Opoku Katakyie on Monday, January 16, 2023, noted.

“Current payment that was made to cover December 2021, still has some validated trainees not receiving theirs coupled with reposted GRA trainees also being unattended to.

“We will be forced to stage our next massive picketing at the Ministry of Finance to demand all arrears if the government fails to pay us as soon as possible,” the statement added.

The government of President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo in 2017 introduced the NABCO programme to address the issue of graduate unemployment in the country.

The initiative was run under seven modules: Educate Ghana, Heal Ghana, Feed Ghana, Revenue Ghana, Digitize Ghana, Enterprise Ghana, and Civic Ghana.

However, the NABCO programme was brought to an end some three years after it was implemented.

The aftermath has seen hundreds of beneficiaries complain about the government owing them several months of arrears and failed attempts to receive payments.

GA/BOG