REDUCING BURDEN ON SERVICE PERSONS (OCT 21)

THE National Service Scheme (NSS) has come up against huge challenges this year due mainly to the fallout from the global economic crisis.
Consequently, some service persons are being rejected by the organisations to which they have been posted because of limited vacancies and economic challenges.
Thus a little over 10 days after the 2009/2010 postings, some of the service persons are yet to know their fate.
Some service persons are unable to access the website of the NSS to know their placements, while certain institutions have failed to absorb those posted to those institutions.
Established in 1974, the scheme has been structured to offer graduates of tertiary institutions the opportunity to offer services in critical areas of national development which, otherwise, would have attracted skilled manpower.
It was originally meant to provide teachers for the classrooms in second-cycle institutions and also offer the service persons the platform to express their gratitude to society for sponsoring their education.
So when it all began, the scheme deployed graduates to every nook and cranny of the country to offer their services to deprived institutions and communities that cannot pay for such personnel from their own resources.
In spite of the challenges, the scheme continues to assist the Ghana Education Service (GES) especially with personnel for the classrooms which would have been empty every academic year.
The DAILY GRAPHIC thinks the only challenge that threatens the future of the scheme is our inability to plan towards its phenomenal growth over the years.
When the scheme took off, there were only three public institutions in the country whose graduates were mandated to do national service.
Presently, besides the public universities that have shot up from three to six, with many campuses across the country, many private universities have been set up, as well as the polytechnics and other tertiary institutions whose products must be posted to institutions as service persons.
That is why the DAILY GRAPHIC believes that the traditional public and private institutions cannot be relied upon to absorb the large number of service persons who are posted every year.
We think the scheme was not conceived to send out service persons to compete for the limited vacancies in the offices for clerical duties but to offer services to the communities, especially the deprived ones.
Even as institutions such as the banks, public boards and corporations reject the service persons for lack of vacancies, our classrooms and health posts are still without teachers and health workers.
The DAILY GRAPHIC calls on parents and service persons to help the scheme by desisting from putting pressure on officials of the scheme to post service persons to the urban centres only.
The scheme will achieve the desired impact if public officials also stop influencing the postings so that the service persons will be posted to areas where their services are needed most.
Some of the present challenges are not the making of the NSS because it responded to requests from the organisations. We can only advise that in the present circumstances the organisations that are rejecting the service persons reconsider their decision.
The DAILY GRAPHIC is aware of the financial challenges but the organisations should do well to absorb the service persons as their contribution to the sustenance of the NSS, for the present bottleneck is just a passing cloud.