We’re borrowing and begging to survive – NABCo trainees

District Coordinators of the Nation Builders Corps (NABCo) in three regions in the north have served notice they will lay down their tools by the start of the new month, May.

The Coordinators are angry over their unpaid allowances which they say have been in arrears since they were commissioned into office in August, 2018.

Speaking to Starr News, the over twenty eight coordinators covering the Northern, Savanna and North East Regions said, the decision has come as necessary following the state of their living conditions.

They claim that their conditions have worsen to the point that a lot of them now depend on families, friends and associates to survive.

“You know most of us are teachers, others were also in various professions and they made us to resign, because of this double salary issue”, one of them spoke anonymously to Starr News in Tamale. “Since then, and all these while, none of us in the whole country has received a penny from government”.

“If I tell you how we’re suffering, my brother, you won’t believe,” the source continued, ” some us actually beg our friends and borrow from family members to survive and feed our own family”.

The Coordinators claim further that none of them across the country have received any logistics from government, which is a contrary to their terms of engagement. The lack of logistics, they stated, is affected monitoring and supervision of the programme.

Another coordinator stated: “Government owes us about six months salary arrears, when they recruited us we were told out salaries will be backdated to June, because we started working before our appointment letters in November 2018. The national headquarters asked us on to several times update our bank details for payment but nothing has happened since”.

The Coordinators said they have decided to down their tools in order force government to release their allowances or at least tell them when to expect it, adding that, all attempts including involving MPs have failed to yield positive results.

“We have to stop working, because anytime we ask, government always blame Bank of Ghana For keeping our money. The finance minister said he has released the money, but always we have released the money yet we are not getting it in out accounts. So when we stop working, we will know if indeed Bank of Ghana is holding our money, it’s quite simple”.

Starr News contacted the Northern regional coordinator of the program Mr. Babs, and he declined to comment.

The NABCO programme is a government initiative to address graduate joblessness in order to solve social problems with the focus on solving public service delivery in health, education, agriculture, technology, governance, revenue mobilization and collection.

The programme hopes to advance knowledge and skills of the graduates as they await better and permanent employment opportunities. In the process, government will also use the program to enhance and improve the basic public infrastructure in terms of access to services.

The government will now be dependent on this initiative to tackle major political campaign promises and to run some main national development policies, strategies and programmes, such as the Double Track School System under the Free Senior High School, Planting for Food and Jobs, Digital Inclusion Agenda, and several others.

Currently, over 70,000 Ghanaian fresh graduates are engaged under the programme in different modules.