Coronavirus: It will be unfair to criticize govt for our lack of resources - NCCE

Deputy Chairperson of the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), Kathleen Addy, has said that criticizing the Government for the commission’s lack of resources is unjustified because the problem of lack of resources has been an existing problem of the NCCE even before the outbreak of the COVID-19 disease.

Some few months back, some Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) lamented that the NCCE was under resourced for the COVID-19 education and as such the Government must ensure that the Commission is resourced.

However Chairperson of the NCCE in an interview on the Happy Morning Show disclosed: “The resource challenge of the NCCE goes beyond just this COVID-19 business. At some point it became our national anthem; always talking about resources and that is because there has been a resource challenge over the years.

It has not been the best so the crying for resources is not limited to the COVID-19 situation. It is a cry that we have been crying for many years and so if we cry to a point and it comes to a particular issue and Government has been responsive to that issue, we want to assume that we have made a little progress that may be from now on people will understand the need to keep the commission resourced properly so that it doesn’t come to a point of emergency and then we are now scrambling around looking for a pick up here or there”.

While she noted that the Government has been supportive of the Commission’s work with resources, she admitted that their work would have been more “vigorous” if the resources had come earlier.

“If we had the transport network in place already. If we had the Public Address (P.A) system in place and all those logistics and substantial budget, we could have even started the campaign in a very vigorous manner. As things stand, we did start, it just was not amplified because we didn’t have the resources”, she added.

In June this year, President Akufo-Addo gave the National Commission for Civic Education, 50 Isuzu vehicles through the Office of the Chief of Staff to support the Commission’s public education campaign on COVID-19.

A sum of GH¢2,517,000 was also released to the Commission to facilitate its work on COVID-19 across the country.