NPP assures: More jobs coming in our next term

The governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) has assured that it will create more jobs in its second term, should the party win the December 7 general election.

The party also intends to build more factories, through its One-District-One-Factory policy, to boost the country’s industrialisation agenda.

Addressing a news conference in Accra yesterday, a member of the party’s 2020 campaign communications team, Nana Akomea, stated that the investment in job creation and building of factories, in the next four years, should result in a factory/manufacturing facility in every district in the country.

“These factories will throw up tens of thousands of direct jobs for you the youth. The food processing factories will see over 50 per cent of our agriculture produce (the maize, tomatoes, peppers, corn, cassava, palm nuts, etc) processed, thus turning our currently predominantly peasant agriculture into commercial business,” he stated.

“The potential of this real development to provide jobs for you the youth is enormous. And this is no pipe dream. This is a reality that will come to pass in the next four years in the NPP government,” he added.

Track record

According to Nana Akomea, the NPP, since 2017, has created over two million direct and indirect jobs targeted at the youth.

Some 788,000 of those jobs, according to him, are in the public sector, 268,000 in the formal private sector, and 1,000,000 in government job creation programmes such as the Nation Builders Corps (NaBcO).

Nana Akomea also recounted how the NPP in 2006 introduced the National Youth Employment Programme, as a job-creation avenue for the youth.

“…The famous NYEP, which is arguably the first deliberate policy of any government in the Fourth Republic, to directly and systematically provide jobs for you, the Ghanaian youth. For the two years’ period of 2006 to 2008, a total of 108,000 direct jobs were provided to you under the NYEP,” he stated.

Nana Akomea bemoaned: “Very sadly in the period after 2008 when the NPP left office, the NYEP was turned into the very infamous GYEEDA, and youth employment became a vehicle for some of the most bare face corruption and stealing of taxpaying monies in the history of the Republic.”

New rent policy

Meanwhile, the government has promised to introduce a new rent policy that will ease the burden on, particularly, the youth when it comes to rent issues.

The policy, Nana Akomea noted, would in the short term cushion the Ghanaian youth from the problem of high rent and long rent advance.

He explained that a scheme would be set up where Government will pay the rent advance for Ghanaians while the beneficiaries pay the rent on monthly basis to the scheme.

“In effect then, the NPP government in its next term will eliminate the big problem of rent advance facing you the youth and indeed many other Ghanaians,” Nana Akomea stressed.

He explained that the policy would be implemented through the National Rental Assistance Scheme, “a new, novel, and a revolutionary scheme that would among other things provide low-interest loans to eligible Ghanaian youth solely to enable them to pay for rental accommodation.”

He explained that the government, as part of the policy, would pay the rent advance directly into the bank accounts of beneficiary landlords, saying it would target Ghanaian youth in both formal and informal sectors with identifiable or regular income.