– Education, Skills & Jobs
The New Patriotic Party is determined to respond proactively to the major concerns of the nation’s youth, which are mainly access to quality education, skills acquisition and securing decent jobs.
The party believes that the nation needs to offer real hope for its youth, and that this can only be achieved if the youth are provided with the right kind of education that delivers them the right set of skills and knowledge demanded by the labour market.
Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the 2012 Flagbearer of the party, made this known when he addressed a seminar organised by the leadership of the party for NPP parliamentary candidates, national executives and spokespersons.
The NPP flagbearer insists the war against poverty can be won when the youth are provided with the right kind of education that equips them with the skills to make them competitive on the job market.
“The greatest challenge facing Ghana and indeed Africa generally is to win that enduring war on poverty,” he noted, stressing, however, that the war cannot be won “using the same ineffective weapons.”
“You can’t do the same thing over and over again and expect to get different results. That is why we need to transform our economy and focus on providing quality education and skills for the youth,” he noted.
Nana Addo stressed that Ghana cannot continue to build a future of hopelessness for its youth, adding that the task of an NPP administration in 2013 will be to offer the youth of this country education, skills and jobs.
“The situation where some 180,000 or more school leavers are thrown onto the streets every year without any basic employable skills must stop. It is too dangerous for Ghana’s security. We want to come to office not with promises but with programmes, programmes that will enhance the quality of life, like universal access to quality education and quality healthcare,” the NPP flagbearer stated.
According to Nana Akufo-Addo, the best legacy a parent can give a child is education and that he has made education his first priority because in his view the most important property that society can bequeath to its citizens is intellectual property.
Nana Addo explained that once the intellectual property of the Ghanaian is built, coupled with the offer of the best of public services and the creation of an environment that promotes private enterprise, “we will surely free up the Ghanaian to climb the ladder of prosperity and enhance the dignity of our people. That is what we stand for and that is what we are fighting for and, by the grace of God, we shall succeed”.
The NPP, according to its flagbearer, has set up a policy team which has been mandated to develop programmes that could be implemented to provide skills and work for the estimated quarter of a million teenagers who are thrown onto the streets every year without any basic employable skills and hence no hope for the future.
“We fully subscribe to the notion that government has a responsibility to provide all its citizens with skills and opportunities to create their own wealth. Let me repeat, the ultimate test for our democracy is winning the enduring war against Africa’s old enemy — mass poverty. I believe we can only win this war by building a New Society of Opportunities”, Nana Addo stressed.
Nana Addo added that the task ahead was more than just creating jobs, but also about building a competitive economy with a competitive work force.
In the view of the NPP flagbearer, Ghana has not been able to win the war against poverty because the nation has been using the same ineffective weapons of old. The only way forward, according to him, is to be deliberate and determined in the pre-independence dream of transforming Ghana from a Guggisberg economy to a modern economy of added value.
“We must free ourselves from the economic arrangements designed by our former colonial masters to serve their particular purpose at the time. I am determined to make my leadership of Ghana the period that our economy is transformed from an exporter of raw materials and retailer of cheap imported goods to a modern, self-sufficient, surplus-producing industrialised one”, Nana Addo stated.
He promised to pursue a programme aimed at the transformation and modernisation of the national economy, “so that it could create jobs and prosperity for the broad masses of our people on the basis of social justice, the rule of law, respect for human rights, the principles of democratic accountability, and individual liberty and enterprise.”
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