Government Should Encourage Private Sector To Create Jobs

By Otchere Darko

Reference: “ “Too much talk is not necessary now. What Ghanaians need now is job creation. Our agriculture industry is in a very bad state now likewise the health sector. Transportation, energy and water are under threat. These are issues the government must take a second look at for the betterment of this country,” he (Professor Frimpong Boateng) said.” [By Courtesy of Ghanaweb General News of Tuesday, 29 April 2014 which was titled “Mahama is a ‘specialist in failure’; (Source: peacefmonline.com)].

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Professor Frimpong Boateng has hit the nail right on the head by saying: “what Ghanaians need now is job creation”. He is also right in arguing that the “too much talk [by the government] is not necessary now”.

Governments everywhere are measured by how much they perform by way of meeting people’s needs and aspirations. They are not measured by how much presidents and government officials talk. Mahama and his government must therefore stop bombarding us (Ghanaians) with their frivolous ‘talk-talk’. They must rather put in place realistic developmental plans that aim at inducing job creation through various private-sector initiatives that have helped other governments elsewhere to create jobs for their youth, since Ghana government itself lacks the financial means to create jobs for Ghanaian youth.

Apart from the failure of [Ghana] government to create the conditions that encourage job creation in Ghana, it is also so strange and sad that every Tom Dick and Harry in Ghana, including churches, private individuals, wants to establish new universities everywhere in Ghana at a time when every Ghanaian knows that there are no jobs in the country to absorb the numerous graduates passing out every year from those universities.

Do these several “private-university education” providers ask themselves where graduates from their universities are going to find work to do after graduation?

Shouldn’t university authorities, [be they private or public ones] , be concerned with long-term, if not year-to-year, availability of job placements for passing-out students before they (the university authorities) offer admissions to new entrants?

Should supply of education in Ghana, in particular, not be seen as a form of contract between students/parents who pay fees to receive education for themselves or for their wards, on one side, and Ghana government and university authorities that charge students and parents for courses they advertise and offer at universities on the other side? And, accordingly, should graduates who fail to find work, after a reasonable number of years of graduation, not have the right to sue Ghana government and university authorities for knowingly or unknowingly creating situations that amount to selling products (degrees and diplomas) that fail to provide the satisfaction they are presumed to offer and, thus, for creating ‘breaches of contract’ and ‘deceptions’?

I can foresee a day coming when angry “unemployed graduates”, from the countless universities that have sprung up in Ghana, will begin to ask serious questions and follow those questions with consequential ‘actions’ that may not augur well for Ghana government and the university authorities that fail to match job availability with intakes of students going to the ever-increasing number of universities whose annual turn-outs tend to augment and worsen the already high youth unemployment existing in the country. Job creation is the only panacea for solving this crucial problem facing Ghanaian youth.

*I therefore join Professor Frimpong Boateng in telling President Mahama and members of his government to end their overzealous talking; and begin to tackle the serious youth unemployment in Ghana by taking “job creation” serious and doing whatever the government needs to do to fulfil the employment dreams of thousands of Ghanaian youth who cannot find jobs; and who, therefore, are finding life-after-school an unbearable ‘ton of teasing torture’.

*And to churches and private individuals who own, or plan to own universities and other higher educational institutions, I say to you: move into job-creation by combining provision of tertiary education with other forms of ‘businesses’ that produce jobs for youth, so as to help the numerous unemployed Ghanaian youth seeking non-existing employment....... unemployed youth who undoubtedly include some of the very graduates your own institutions turn out every year. It is certainly easier, I guess, to set up new universities as income-generating investment ventures than to set up other commercial businesses, such as large-scale farming or other forms of agro-based ventures, building and construction, manufacturing, banking, insurance, et cetera. Nevertheless, it is by helping to counter youth unemployment in Ghana that churches and individual private entrepreneurs can prove to critics that they (churches and private individuals) are as interested in the welfare of Ghanaians as they are interested in making money out of people.