#FixTheCountry? - Give the president work to do

A greater number of Ghanaian young adults are unemployed because they have failed to give the president Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo Addo and his New Patriotic Party [NPP] government work to do.

Often than not, you hear these unemployed people going on street protests and pointing accusing fingers at the president and his government for failing to create employment in the country.

But how many of these young energetic but unemployed youth have acquired requisite professional skills, business ideas or have the passion for doing something to create the job and subsequently generate income out of it?

The myth that the majority of these unemployed have to deal with is that only the president and his government have to create jobs for people to earn their wages and salaries to live responsible lives.

But you will agree with me that the majority of the people have also failed to put out ideas, policies and programmes for the president and his government to adopt and implement to create the necessary jobs to engage them to earn their wages and salaries to live responsible lives.

The truth of the matter is that the president and his government create an enabling environment for people to create jobs so that it will collect taxes to generate revenue to carry out social interventions to cushion the people.
That means chiefs, clergy, academics, research fellows, policy think tanks and even ordinary citizens must come out with ideas, policies and programmes for the government to implement to develop the country.

So instead of people without jobs going on protests, they must come up with ideas to draw policies and programmes they believe when implemented by the government can create the necessary jobs for them to earn their wages and salaries to live responsible lives.

Although it is their fundamental human right to stage protests and ask the government to cushion them through job creation, most of the protests don't serve the purpose as protesters are hired by opposition party activists to destabilize the government.

Should the president meet the unemployed demonstrators at the picketing line and ask them what jobs they would like to be hired for? Trust me, the majority of the protesters won’t be able to tell the president what skills they have acquired to qualify for any job hiring.

Meanwhile, they are always wearing red bands or cladding in red hitting the picketing lines to accuse the president and his government of not creating jobs in the country.

The first thing one needs to know is what passion he or she has in doing something and has gained experience to demonstrate efficiency and quality.
After all, employment is the acquisition of knowledge and skills of doing what you are passionate about to create the job, earning a wage or salary for what you are doing.

That means to get a call up for a job, one needs to be able to demonstrate the required knowledge and skills which when hired could apply to increase production and maximize profit.

When one has this idea, the complaint of being jobless that develops into hating the government for not creating jobs for them to earn their wages and salaries to live responsible lives will give way to skills training, self-employment and revolution of cottage industries, generation of income and revenue to develop the country.

Come to think of it, the number of hours we waste on protests. Couldn’t we spend such hours on skills training and the impact it will make in each and every individual person’s life?

In the developed world, you see each and everyone embarking on self-employment where they apply their acquired knowledge and skills in doing something they are passionate about thereby creating a job and income for themselves.

Here in Canada, where democracy thrives, not many protests take place because people are more concerned about acquiring knowledge and skills, applying them to create self-employment to generate income to live a responsible life.

That is what is happening in developed countries where the individual acquires knowledge and skills in a certain profession, apply for job placement, negotiate on wage or salary and apply the skills and get paid for it.

The government only creates an enabling environment by rolling out human resource training programmes to create the workforce for the industries to hire and generate its revenue by collecting taxes to provide social services such as health insurance, scholarships, construction of roads and houses and provide security.

Whereas in Ghana, even people are not taking advantage of the various skills and apprenticeship programmes to acquire requisite knowledge and skills to be readily available for employment but rather keep accusing the government of the lack of jobs in the country.

It is now time for the young and energetic youth of the motherland Ghana to change from going on useless, empty and wasteful protests and rather acquire requisite knowledge and skills to make them readily available for the employment market to earn their wages and salaries to live responsible lives.