The Management of the National Service Scheme (NSS) has withdrawn the appointment of persons who were employed at the Secretariat by the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) in December 2016.

The NSS employed some personnel in December 2016 but on the advice of the Minister of Education, has laid them off.

A statement from the National Service Scheme signed by newly appointed Ag. Executive Director, Ussif Mustapha, indicated that the former Ag. Executive Directive, Michael Kpessah-Whyte was asked by the Public Services Commission to halt the recruitment process but he (Kpessah-Whyte) ignored it.

Speaking on Peace FM's 'Kokrokoo' in relation to the issue, Atik Mohammed, General Secretary of the People's National Convention (PNC), has sympathised with the affected persons.

According to him, the withdrawal of their appointment was far-fetched because the former Ag. Executive Directive didn't do due diligence before employing them.

He said it appeared as though he (Kpessah-Whyte) was in a haste to tender their appointments before the elapse of the erstwhile NDC regime, and so believed in his quest to do that may have breached some laws.

Atik Mohammed, however, was empathetic towards the affected employees and urged them not to "give up because there will be an opportunity for you to reapply, if only you want to work with the National Service Secretariat.”

He further wondered whether the NSS Human Resource Department was incapacitated to effectively recruit new hands, hence employing people only for their appointments to be revoked.

“Is it that the HR showed incapacity to deliver? Or was it the case that the Head didn’t have confidence in that department or the department, itself, proved unable to do the work? Because I don’t understand it. It’s not that the people did it for free. They’ve been paid. Meanwhile, we have people who regularly, they’re paid by the State to do their job and their work is they do these recruitments. And yet, you leave them behind and recruit new personnel to do the job that people have already been paid to do; so we make another payment. All of these things add to the building of the huge cost of running government,” he said.